Matt writes: "Yet even though D.C. cops seize thousands of illegal guns every year, this has relatively low efficacy because criminals just get new guns."
The solution is to seize the *criminals* in addition to the guns. A guaranteed 5 years in prison if caught with an illegal firearm would go a long way to a better situation than we have today.
It ought to be 55 just to make sure they age out of the primary crime years.
If someone has an illegally possessed firearm due to a criminal record then that's exactly the type of criminal that does a disproportionate amount of violent crime.
Yes. While I’m not opposed to Matt’s suggestions here we have laws that the entire criminal justice system seems entirely unwilling to enforce to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.
ATF investigates an incredibly small amount of straw sales, for instance.
Every local newspaper article about a gun homicide has a paragraph with the shooter’s criminal history, and it almost always includes previous convictions (often multiple!) for unlawful possession of a firearm. There are laws on the books we could use to prevent a lot of these deaths, which we appear to have done in the past, but we wanted to unsolve the problem :-/
2028 Democratic nominee should make a big show of "I'm not going to ask for a single new gun law, I'm just going to ask for the money to enforce the ones we already have to stop criminals."
This is one thing that boggles my mind about more liberal/progressive jurisdictions. On one hand, they want to pass more restrictive gun laws, but on the other hand, they don’t reliably prosecute illegal possession. This makes no sense to me.
Repress law abiders but let law breakers do their thing.
Progressives don't believe in consequentialism. They believe in being "good people." Good people don't need to own guns. Good people don't support our unjust criminal justice system and long prison sentences for the disadvantaged.
It works fairly well in Britain even as the polices ability/willingness to enforce the law in general is obviously degrading significantly. Criminals rarely actually fire/shoot anything prohibited in the firearms acts as it immediately upgrades the police response to serious armed response and your prison sentence from what might have been a year or even a suspended sentence to decades.
I grew up on a rather rough council estate and tip offs about guns would lead to extremely serious instant police responses and was used a way to get rid of people who had done something sufficiently bad to the estate.
"and was used a way to get rid of people who had done something sufficiently bad to the estate."
Can you explain more about that? I'm probably not the only American who doesn't even know what a council estate is. This sort of sounds like some sort of community action, but I don't know how big the community might be, whether it had a leadership that would decide to exile the bad person, what kind of things "sufficiently bad" were etc. The whole thing sounds interesting but I'm not informed enough about the UK to imagine it.
Rough equivalent to American "The Projects", subsidised housing that often fills up with less savoury people. I'm not going to pretend it was some honourable community policing system (anyone who has lived in this sort of environment knows that they aren't what certain types romanticise they are), but it always seemed ad hoc. Fairly close to community action, you stay on good terms with your neighbours and they look out for you and petty crime against your property won't happen (e.g. things stolen from your yard or break ins), if someone is causing problems word will spread until someone scary will have a word with them and if that fails it will escalate to things like reporting them for weapons offences with the community just implicitly agreeing to tell the police that they did see things like weapons if asked after the fact. If there was any centralised leadership I was never exposed to it.
My estate wasn't super rough though, on the really rough estates someone causing problems would probably have their teeth kicked in if they didn't stop when warned as they won't want police attention. I've known people from the really rough estates and from how they talked (and services offered) it sounds similarly decentralised.
The British term for public housing. Biggest issue there in the US is the Fourth Amendment. I can't bust down a door because Jerry, someone who frequently lies to my face, told me there was a gun inside.
Edit: to clarify further, even if I were to get a warrant based on Jerry telling me this, there is a section on the affidavit for the search warrant which amounts to "why is Jerry a reliable source?" And given that Jerry is in fact NOT a reliable source, I cannot legally use his statement to get into that house.
No it wouldn't, because then we'd end up with the enormous costs of running a criminal justice system that guaranteed 5 years in prison (and the attendant collateral costs, like de facto unemployability) to anyone caught with an illegal firearm. And people (correctly, in this instance) aren't willing to pay those costs.
As in so many other areas, Americans want high state capacity but also want to pay for a government with no state capacity.
Your last sentence is what I feel like screaming after every community or city council meeting - people wanting everything, but then mad that it has to be paid for. I might steal this sentence.
Or, you know, people would carry them less as we already know is the case when these laws are rigorously enforced.
Also worth pointing out that basically no one catches an illegal firearms charge as a first offense that puts them in prison and gives them a record, and that was the case even when we were much more vigorous about pursuing illegal guns.
Do you know how much money it would cost to imprison a significant % of the US population?
>It's cheaper to imprison a repeat offender than to have to keep catching them and putting them through the courts
I mean look, I agree with your last sentence, and I'm not an anti-police progressive type. With that being said- just from a mathematical/budgetary perspective, no, this is totally wrong. It's extremely expensive to house & feed adults 24/7/365, build the physical prisons, maintain the prisons, pay the guards who are probably unionized, etc. etc. If the US locked up say 1-3% of the population, I've seen estimates of $500 billion-a trillion annually. It's very very very expensive
Policy choices. We could make it cheaper. We used to make it cheaper.
Food isn't expensive, actually. Neither are large buildings with prison cells. Prison guards cost what they cost, but they're mid-range blue collar jobs.
You're making a basic analytic error of comparing the easily seen and calculable -- the cost of prisons -- against what is very hard to calculate -- the cost of insufficiently impeded violent criminality. The latter is at least an order of magnitude larger than the former, but in a million ways large and small.
Do you know how much society loses from the effects of violent crime and dealing with the potential for violent crime? We have entire plots of otherwise extremely valuable urban real estate that are uninhabitable by civilized citizens. We go through immense rigmaroles to avoid being victimized. The victims, of course, matter too.
The larger/worse your violent criminal population is the MORE IMPORTANT it is to lock them the fuck up so they can't affect civilized society.
I just googled "what is the cost of the effects of crime in the us" and the Google AI says "studies say" between $2.6 and $5 trillion. (Of course, these numbers could vary wildly based on how you choose to value e.g. the price of a human life, or the psychic cost of fear.)
So by your own numbers we can't not afford to expand our prisons.
I don't, but you seem to, so you should share that important factual information with the group, and compare and contrast it with the costs of imprisonment.
This is a wonderfully ignorant take since you have to pretend to be unaware of the costs of police dealing with repeat violent offenders, the courts dealing with repeat violent offenders, and the victims of repeat violent offenders vs. simply the cost of incarceration.
This is obvious on its face but you can foolishly try to pretend I need to have a study demonstrating the efficacy of incapacitation. This type of educated illogic over common sense is responsible for a lot of failed social policy.
Hm. I made the mistake of assuming that you were here to make a factual argument, rather than just blathering and blustering pointlessly about your fact-free personal opinions. You have successfully persuaded me otherwise. Good work!
You are pretty obviously beyond factual persuasion if you need a double-blind study on the efficacy of parachutes there bud.
The cult of scholarship to avoid accepting basic truth is just motivated reasoning with extra steps.
I actually did make a factual argument is the thing your warped understanding of how to evaluate basic reality compels you to ignore. It’s not my opinion that police, courts, and crime impacts are more expensive than prisons. If it were, why even have prisons. Would be cheaper and easier to just let them run free.
We have done stuff like that for years. We don't catch enough felons in possession for that to work. Which gets back to putting tracking devices in guns and doing registration, which the paranoids in the gun movement are convinced would lead to confiscation.
Doesn't it work quite well? My impression is that the empirical literature says that locking up people with illegal handguns significantly reduces shootings and explains a decent share of declines in shootings
I'm a non-paranoid gun owner but I think this is part of where it would be helpful to clearly lay out what your regulatory structure and endgame is. Right now there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be either (i) a first step to confiscation, given that's what the most passionate advocates of more restrictions want, or (ii) another way to bother law abiding owners while remaining reluctant to do anything about people who actually use their (often ill gotten) weapons to commit crimes, homicides or otherwise.
Regarding tracking devices in firearms I think it is probably pretty underrated for those outside of the know just how easy it is to make a perfectly functional firearm with readily available tools. Increasingly this is what you see, now referred to in the media for purposes of full on moral panic, as 'ghost guns.' The technology to do this of course exists in other places too but happens less because, while a legal firearm market probably matters on the margins, murder and crime are complex socio-cultural phenomena that tend to defy technocratic solutions.
Are people making a lot of ghost guns in places where guns are prohibited? It doesn't seem like it.
You can't separate this issue from the fact that people who really like guns are both (1) into dominance politics and (2) very paranoid. So they say a lot of things about how whatever we are going to do is going to lead to all these slippery slopes, and, sure, it's possible (you can't dismiss the concerns entirely), there's also plenty of countries in this world with different gun regulation regimes that seem to be reasonably stable equilibria.
I think that’s an untrue and pejorative characterization. The claim that people who like guns are into dominance and are paranoid is not one to accept at face value and is contrary to my experience.
The leaders of gun orgs and 2nd amendment activists claimed Obama was going to confiscate everyone's guns before they left office. That kept on not happening. If there wasn't a baseline level of being a paranoid person in the movement, Trump would never have become the Republican nominee.
I used to be one of those folks and know a lot of them still.
There are definitely a non trivial number of loud types that you describe, but there are also a large number who are not, who are basically normies with a hobby, a hobby many people don’t talk much about.
If in 2028, President AOC sweeps into office leading a Democratic wave with a Super majority in the Senate and House, "confiscation" of firearms, would gun confiscation happen?
I think it's an impossibility even in that impossible scenario.
Edit: I agree that there are many progressives out there who would like to ban guns in the US. I'm probably one of them! But I don't think anything remotely close to mass confiscation is ever happening in this country.
My understanding is that the chemistry to make (smokeless) powder and (even more so) primers is still hard enough that, in countries where you can't buy pre-made powder/primers or ammunition without a gun license, then there's little point in ghost guns.
I believe that you can buy powder and primers without even a background check in the US, so anyone with the technical competence to make a ghost gun can make ammunition ("reloading").
You can buy black powder without a FAC (FireArms Certificate) in the UK, but not smokeless.
Plus there's an estimated couple billion rounds of ammo laying around the US. If you make a ghost gun in say 9mm, easy enough to just some 9mm somewhere. Ammo purchases here don't require IDs or background checks, etc.
The civil libertarian case against tracking is a lot harder to swallow in an age where we all willingly buy smartphones. Maybe that's the compromise--introduce it as a feature and have smith and wesson track the data instead of the government and nobody will care.
I think a tracking requirement would be contrary to the 4th amendment and technically very challenging, but the question was about having dictatorial authority.
Well I'm just saying it would be totally extra-regulatory. The big arms manufacturers would just start doing it and sell it as a "find my gun" feature and everyone would willingly buy into it. On the one hand, I'm skeptical that gun people would just lie down and allow giant corporations to track them, but in 2002 that's what I would have said about smartphones.
I mean, if you pretend that the question is totally separate from a much larger debate covering all kinds of regulatory, constitutional, and cultural issues, sure, easy peasy. :)
Consider a case where the government orders anyone attending a protest to carry a tracking device. Is "we all willingly buy smartphones" a good justification?
Everyone at a protest does carry a tracking device! It's how we caught a whole bunch of the Jan. 6 rioters. You don't need a regulation requiring it, people obviously don't care.
The venn diagram of people with the engineering wherewithal to manufacture their own gun and the willingness to commit the senseless violence associated with guns right now seems to be that one Japanese guy who shot Abe.
What you're missing is that once a gun is manufactured, it's now 'out there' in the world. One guy can manufacture & sell it, another can use it. Guns have a functional lifespan of decades. This tracks the way illegal guns seem to work now- one person steals it, or buys it in a straw purchase, and then someone else actually uses it in a crime. I agree the average street criminal isn't going to personally 3D print a weapon themselves, but division of labor etc. etc.
In the same way that someone will build a trap into a car, rewire two buttons on the console to run the trap, and then give it to a meth-head to drive from Tampa to Minneapolis, someone can learn basic gunsmithing and 3D printing, then sell the gun to the same meth-head.
Isn't that because of supply and demand? There is legal supply of guns the way there isn't for those drugs. If you removed the legal supply of guns, I suspect that profit opportunity would go up dramatically.
>Right now there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be either (i) a first step to confiscation, given that's what the most passionate advocates of more restrictions want<
I dunno. Seems to me it's often very hard to get things enacted in America. By constitutional design. "What the most passionate advocates" want more often isn't what becomes policy. No, what becomes policy is usually "compromise."
That said, Democrats shouldn't spend an ounce of political capital on gun control as things currently stand (if circumstances change, the political calculus could change).
I think most gun owners believe not unreasonably that if there was a Democratic majority on SCOTUS, it would suddenly become much more likely that states could regulate firearms up to and including confiscation.
It's amazing how this level of paranoia that someone is going to come take all of their guns is based on pretty much no actual historical precedent in this country. Because of the electoral map, this is one of the forms of paranoia that people can display without looking like a nutcase on the street.
A lot of the paranoids also believe the UN is going to invade Kansas with black helicopters. Even when Democrats have been quiet on this issue, the paranoia is there. The NRA has changed a lot in the past 70 years to be an organization that has relied on stoking paranoia to cultivate donations. Gun culture has its own agency.
I mean, we've lived through an era where a book by a major conservative activist called for putting all American Muslims in internment camps, but anyone who thought Bush was actually going to do that was a crank.
Agreed, there are huge barriers to it and I understand that the question was premised on those barriers not existing. But we can look at blue states that have lots of performative gun laws combined with reticence about enforcing them against certain people. DC that MY references is like that.
And don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that they'd absolutely throw the book at someone like me for a hyper technical violation. But then I'm not the type of person who would ever commit one, certainly not intentionally.
It doesn't get nearly the attention of sanctuary states and cities for the poorly documented, but there are plenty of 2A sanctuary states and counties.
And its not just Red states! Upstate NY sheriffs basically said the the NY Large Capacity Magazine ban was a dead letter and wouldn't be enforced by local LEOs.
As an advocate of adopting bog-standard, rich country firearms regulations, I'm actually not morose about the possibility of bringing such laws to the US in the fullness of time. I'm old enough to remember when gay marriage and legal, recreational weed seemed like the stuff of fantasy novels. So you never know!
But certainly *at present* there's no plausible political-judicial path to doing so, and moreover making the inevitably quixotic attempt to effect such changes in America is highly likely to cause political damage to the party associated with such an effort. So no sense going there.
(But one day the political-judicial outlook will be different: the logic for adopting common sense rules is simply too compelling. We're just not there in 2026, nor likely for quite a good long while yet.)
"another way to bother law abiding owners while remaining reluctant to do anything about people who actually use their (often ill gotten) weapons to commit crimes, homicides or otherwise."
It seems odd to concede the existence of the political willpower to put trackers in every new gun that's sold while simultaneously claiming a lack of willpower to actually go after serious criminals who use the guns to commit serious crimes, including homicide. I'm fairly confused by the argument TBH. You think that if we could track the gun that was used to murder someone we would be reluctant to follow through on investigating that crime? The change you're conceding is a pretty enormous shift in the way guns would be operating in America, but you then seem to hold steady every other aspect of culture and society around guns to say why you don't think it would be effective in any way.
Given the current landscape of US politics I don't think this is all that odd. The current political party advocating for ever more restrictive gun laws currently also strongly advocates for basically never putting anyone in jail for more than 30 minutes until they finally tip over into murder, and even then there is an army of progressive lawyers trying to "exonerate" them.
Does it? Many Democrats claim the 2A doesn't actually protect an individual right to possess firearms. A Democrat-dominated SCOTUS could take up a 2A case, adopt the dissent's position in DC v. Heller, and read the 2A into irrelevance.
Yes, likewise the whole system of licensing and tracking is super porous and often times not even done with computers. Just have one big database where you could track where guns used in crimes are coming from would be an enormous step forward, but a lot of the gun rights people basically see that as the same as living in Nazi Germany.
Yes, Congress could totally change the law to make it easier to address gun crime and funding ATF a lot more but they don't do that in no small part because the gun rights lobby and movement is super opposed to those things.
The cheapest, ricketiest old photolithography machines out there could EASILY print microscopic repeating QR codes that would be resistant to the damage caused by being fired. A fun fact about QR codes is that they can be reconstructed with barely 25% of the pattern surviving; repeat this by thousands of them barely a micron wide (child’s play for the lithography machine), and you should have PLENTY of the pattern surviving to be read.
From there, you can trace the ammunition to its point of purchase. It’s not perfect, but it’s dramatically better than most of the forensic ballistics tech we currently have.
This is making me think of the scene in "The Dark Knight" where Batman reconstructs a bullet that somehow leads him to a specific individual shooter (my recollection is that the film is rather vague on how that latter part worked) . . . .
They do this on NCIS sometimes too, it’s silly. They’ve also hacked into people’s smart TVs to listen to them without warrants (I assume this is actually possible but that the cops don’t/can’t do it)
NCIS also has images that are "enhanced" to identify suspects from a pixel. 20 years later, AI can generate human faces to insert into a grainy, upscaled image, but it's impossible to reliably generate the *correct* face if you have no idea who it's supposed to be. That's not a technological limitation, the information you need doesn't exist.
Truth is often stranger than fiction, because it's not constrained by the writers' imagination. But fiction is sometimes not constrained by logical possibility.
I am not sure how it works, but where I live it's not really gun "seizures" taken from a crime scene, but a gun amnesty program where the police work with a local church to collect guns. The people bringing them in aren't necessarily the criminals, but their relatives or those who know where community guns are stored.
It's a myth that we don't already do that. When Matt talks about the seizing of thousands of guns, that's not thousands of criminals each possessing one gun, that's scooping up dozens of guns from one or two criminals because the DC police do concentrate on finding and eliminating guns qua guns.
There already is a minimum mandatory five year enhancement for possession during a crime or illegal possession in general, under both DC and Federal law. There are similar mandatory minimums in most states.
Prosecutors love using these laws because they are the easiest thing in the world to prove.
The problem isn't that we're not punishing people enough for these crimes, it's that the licit to illicit gun market is so seamless that there is an unending source of guns for criminals. Supply effectively exceeds demand.
A major issue preventing locking people up is DC law. Often what happens is police will find a gun in a car, in a house, etc. but not on someone’s person. Under DC law it is extremely difficult to convict such a person of illegal possession. So they walk.
Based on a few nuggets of information I've encountered on Substack, coupled with my own experiences, the issue may be less about DC law regarding possession, and more about the legal system in DC, coupled with a disconnect between the police and the prosecutor's office, which leaves prosecutors dismissing winnable cases because they don't understand why those cases are winnable.
Someone on Substack who mentioned they spent some time working for the DC legal system, with several months in the prosecutor's office, stated that sometime in 2016, the system changed. Previously, officers who made arrests the night before would stay on past their scheduled off time, or come in a few hours after clocking out, in order to go over the case with a prosecutor. This system was despised by the officers, because it sucked-they could easily be stuck there until the afternoon. The part of me that started work last night at 8 wonders why the AUSO couldn't assign a couple attorney's each day to come in early and handle things, but I'm also aware of why they didn't. The change meant the prosecutors had to rely on the reports, without officer input, in deciding whether or not to press whatever charges they were arrested for.
The gradual decline in prosecutions following that decision tells me these interactions created ties between the AUSO and the MPD. The prosecutors learned to speak cop; the cops learned to write in lawyer. The prosecutors got a feel for which officers testified well, and the officers knew who to go to for legal questions. Without these interactions, and as new blood entered both departments, those ties fell apart. And so the prosecutors began dropping cases they didn't understand; the cops stopped adding the sorts of lines to their reports the lawyers could underline; and the system started falling apart.
An important point on gas taxes is simply that they should be a percentage, like any other sales tax. Not cents per gallon. The tax gets eaten up by inflation.
That would make more sense if the gas tax went into the general tax pool to be used in any way lawmakers decide, how it usually works in Europe. But in America we use gas taxes to fund transportation maintenance, operations, and capital projects, and it's important that it remain a stable source of revenue. If it were a percentage, it would fluctuate wildly as the global price of oil fluctuates. It's not like a general sales tax, where it would be pretty stable since most prices of goods are pretty stable, and you're averaging across so many goods. It's taxing a commodity that constantly rises and falls in price with large swings. So the flat, nominal amount does make sense given the tax's usual purpose. However, to address your concern about inflation, the gas tax could simply be indexed to inflation so the tax amount slowly increases over time.
I've long wondered if it should be an inflation-adjusted stabilizer. You pick a target price, and as the world market price fluctuates, the at-the-pump tax automatically moves in the opposite direction to counteract that. Building in an inflation adjustment would have been very hard back in the day when oil prices drove so much of the economy, but would be easier today. The time to do it is of course when prices at the pump are very high: you roll it out as a temporary *reduction* in taxes until world prices become sane.
Yeah. A lot of states have additional taxes when you register an electric car for this purpose. It seemed like shitty Republican nonsense until I realized that they still put wear and tear on the roads. They do this in Mississippi but also in Washington state…
We should raise it (creating good incentives around smaller/electric vehicles and less driving) and then keep the proceeds out of the hands of state DOTs, who will build additional lane-miles until they've covered the entire country and start eyeing the moon.
“The strategy of “hope Trump fucks up the economy badly enough that we can get away with blowing off public opinion on cultural issues” looks like it just might work, but I still don’t think it’s a good strategy. I do, however, think it’s a strategy that the Democratic faithful mostly wants” so I explained this to some msnbc boomers recently as I also have a slightly unhinged hope that trump really fucks up iran and the economy so we can win again. BUT what I also explained was that what we are hoping for is the economic suffering and unemployment of our fellow Americans and mostly the already poor and lower wage. Unemployment is bad and we should all recognize that what we are hoping for is a recession.
For me it's not just the crazy social issues anymore, it's also the kitchen table economic issues. I don't think I can vote for a party that's response to high housing costs is rent control. The insanity is too deep.
Unfortunately the populist slop coming from both parties where there is no intellectual rigor will lead to bad policies imo.
But you even see with Mamdani I think that the realities of governing make it tough to provide simple answers to complex problems. What sounds fun to the masses, isn't really possible. That's why having outsiders provide hot takes or thinking they can just do things better if they try harder or speak louder is super ignorant and really bad long term for politics.
We had a similar issue here with Seattle’s new mayor. She seems genuinely surprised to find out that nonwhite residents of neighborhoods with shootings wanted more cops and cameras. She also wanted to add large amounts of shelter and housing for the homeless but has been struggling because it is in fact a difficult problem. She also seems surprised that most people in a drug encampment turned down offers of housing. It seemed simple from her progressive bubble but the problem turned out to be more difficult
May she get up to speed quick. I was pleasantly surprised to see few signs of homelessness when driving up to Swedish today for an errand. But I have seen more in West Seattle since she became mayor, which is absolutely unacceptable.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say the response of the Democratic Party to high housing costs is rent control. There are many candidates who favor that, yes.
This sure seems to be the popular response in dem controlled states. Is this not on the ballot statewide in Mass? Is Mamdani not a proponent? It's not the only answer, but it seems common enough.
Why not just vote for candidates who don’t support rent control? Because if you go with “this is on the ballot in one state” as the standard for what the whole party supports, you’re going to be pretty shaken by what can be laid at the feat of the Republican Party.
I just want to say that Matt’s examples in this piece really worry me. Voting against ICE and things like Laken Riley aren’t about “culture”, they’re good strategic decisions to make. Whether Trump can succeed or not, we’ve seen clear indications that the purpose of ICE is to assemble a loyal paramilitary force that answers to the President. I am optimistic that Trump won’t pull this off, but the intention is there. Democratic politicians *should* be voting against that in lockstep, and their voters *should* be punishing them for voting for these things. To the extent we don’t have to worry about ICE being a Presidential army, it’ll be because Trump is incompetent and because the public saw them for the unpopular move that Democrats should have recognized them for — but popular or not Dems should assume these moves will work and that they’re aimed at disenfranchising them. Matt’s casual misdiagnosis maddens me because this isn’t “culture”, it’s basic democratic hygiene that Matt is relabeling as culture.
I hate Matt’s opinions on this because he’s been consistently wrong about the danger of Trump, about how far Trump would go, and about the need to confront Trump on these abuses. To the extent we survive this it’ll be because Trump was incompetent and we were able to retain our free and fair electoral system, not because the threats weren’t real. The cost of Matt’s myopia here is that his inability to perceive and counter these serious threats also reduces the credibility of his more moderate policy proposals. Pretending this is “culture” is not the right way forwards.
Without touching on the specifics of your comment, I think it comes down to: what do you think will restrain Trump more, individual votes like those mentioned (ICE, Laken Riley) OR flipping the Senate and House at midterms?
Ideally those aren’t in conflict. But if we presume they are (and the reps making those calls certainly seem to think so), I personally would like to see Trump handicapped for the next two years by a Democratic House and Senate even at the expense of some individual votes that I don’t like.
But of course, many Dems voted for the AUMF in 2002 thinking that it would help them come back to power. Opposing it turned out to be the better decision.
It was certainly a better decision for the personal careers of several Democrats, most notably Obama. Not sure if it would have been a better decision for the Democratic party brand as a whole to have been in lockstep opposition
I would phrase it differently: what faith do you have that some worthless vote to fund ICE in February or March will have any impact on the midterms in November? Fox News will spend the next six months demonizing all Democrats for voting against ICE/DHS funding, and it will either work on the electorate or not. (I strongly suspect that it won’t be very effective, even in relatively conservative-leaning districts, particularly by November.) The number of people who say “oh that guy made a vote, he’s totally different from the rest of the Dems” is likely very small. In general: folks who think that This One Vote will matter to the disengaged masses are usually wrong.
But a Democratic Party that can’t guarantee unity on issues of *existential importance to the survival of the party*? That matters very much. Compromise on that, you’re going to suffer a lot of anger from the base, *and the base will be right*. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you won’t be able to elect those moderate politicians because the electoral system itself will be compromised.
ETA: we’ve been very lucky in Trump that he’s incompetent, and he’s still made enormous progress in executing the building blocks of a Hungary-style one-party state. All it will require is a competent future leader to complete the job. This isn’t theoretical, and no, doing nothing whatsoever and allowing your party to support it is *not* the winning move.
I spent my whole life with the assumption that’s we’d never have masked police or a corrupt DoJ arresting political enemies or concentration camps or Presidential appointees caught on video taking bags of cash and laughing at the FBI. If you’d told me this was coming a decade ago I’d have laughed and said it sounds like the plot of a bad movie. I don’t think anything here is hyperbolic.
More likely than it's been in ages, but even if Magyar pulls it off he's still got the same problem as Donald Tusk, plus all the businesses and media that Orban gave to his friends will be hovering around. It wouldn't be surprising to see Orban back after an interregnum.
1. You don’t actually have to believe that a worthless vote to fund ICE will be remembered at midterms for it to make sense. You could also believe that a vote to defund ICE would be remembered by voters in your district in a negative way. So it’s not that it’s necessarily benefiting them positively but avoiding the negative backlash a different vote could have caused.
2. I think your theory of the disengaged masses is wrong. They almost all vote precisely because of “that one issue” - they aren’t broadly informed about everything that’s going on but they have one thing that gets a bee in their bonnet and drives them to go vote this year when they usually don’t or to switch sides. Now what that “issue” is varies massively across swing voters (and mostly it’s the economy, stupid) but I defer to representatives of their own districts (particularly those cited who have typically been able to outperform, presumably because of a particular ability to understand their electorate) to know what is likely to be important for their constituents more so than I do a random internet commenter who probably lives across the country from them and is highly motivated for them to vote a certain way and therefore argue backwards into why it would have been strategic to do so.
My claim is not that “they don’t care about this one issue.” My claim is that there likely isn’t an enormous intersection in the Venn diagram of people for whom (1) this issue is hugely motivating to their vote six months out, (2) who will vote for a member of the party which is overwhelmingly against that issue (at a party level), but (3) is informed enough to know that *their rep* supports that issue, even though s/he belongs to said party.
I’m sure those informed voters do exist. I’m just wondering if they’re so numerous that it’s worth sacrificing the party’s entire ability to credibly confront serious threats. And more critically, given how many errors the party has made just to get us back here to Trump being in charge, can the Democratic Party credibly command support from fundraisers and its base if they continuously demonstrate *zero* ability to execute and compel party discipline?
I wouldn’t say I have 100% faith by any means. It might be closer to 45%. But I am fully willing to take some calculated risks in service of the goal of winning at midterms. I think to oppose those you have to be pretty confident it won’t help you in order to prioritize individual votes over the much larger and more significant goal - and I don’t have a high enough degree of confidence that they won’t work to justify that.
So I would flip your question back to you: how much faith do you have that these types of calls won’t help and are you willing to risk the midterms on it?
At this point I think the House is going to go to the Dems. I think the margin is going to be large enough that these votes don’t matter.
On the flip side, money is really going to matter. Not just for the house, but especially for the Senate. Winning a Senate seat in Texas or Maine or (long shot) Florida is going to require enormous Democratic donor enthusiasm. People have to be willing to crawl over broken glass (or at least make many painfully large donations) and to do that they need to feel confident that a winning Democratic coalition will actually vote for their priorities. This is essentially about signaling credibility.
The Democratic Party has done a genuinely terrible job of signaling credibility. People fought like goblins to get Dems into office in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and they were given ineptitude and inaction in return. The party is incredibly unpopular. More dangerous is that wealthy and powerful donors have lost faith: there’s a reason that 2017 Bezos supported the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post and 2026 Bezos is dismantling it and turning its opinion page conservative. People aren’t going to take the personal risk of lining their money up with a Democratic Party that has no long-term ability to deal with threats beyond just winning the next election. There’s very little time left and we’re going to have to demonstrate some ability to execute once in office. These votes demonstrate that we still can’t demand party discipline even on priorities. So voters and donors are asking: what’s the point of helping that party win?
Suozzi was made to apologize for supporting ICE funding not because the Democrats are dominated by “open borders” fringe wingnuts, but because ICE under Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad organization that routinely violates people’s rights, up to and including shooting two American citizens dead in the street.
Matt is much too smart to be confused about this, so (unless something has happened to his brain) I tend to think he’s being disingenuous when he treats Democratic concerns about this as though it’s generic culture war stuff.
If you’re not concerned about ICE or creeping authoritarianism, just say so! Don’t try to downplay these issues by misdiagnosing them as weird lib-voter bugaboos, like a preference for organic milk.
The irony is that if Trump were less stupid and less obsessed with making libs cry, he could have turned ICE into an organization that was effective at rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants *without* setting off the median voter’s “gaaahhh I don’t want this!!” response.
I do think there’s a conflict between “be an effective immigration agency” and “be a masked police force designed to intimidate voters and your political enemies.” Trump and his cronies are clearly willing to sacrifice the former to achieve the latter, which we should take seriously — and is why we shouldn’t be treating this like a casual culture-war issue to win points for our factional Democratic interests.
I also agree with you that the unpopular behavior of ICE is currently self-limiting, but that isn’t guaranteed. A terrorist attack or a great economy could be enough to bring him back from underwater. Moreover the unpopular nature of ICE should make it *easier* for D candidates to vote against funding it. If we can’t maintain party discipline against an unpopular President’s least-popular policy initiative, we’re dead. And Democratic voters across the country are right to demand better execution from the party, particularly after the fiasco that was the Biden presidency. Who cares if you win if you’re just paving the road for Trump v3 to successfully weaponize ICE?
1. In the specific case of the Riley bill, it doesn't seem like having voted for it will help any Dem very much in a general election, nor will having voted against it hurt very much.
2. Was that foreseeable at the time of the vote? I kind of think maybe it was.
3. Broadly speaking, I tend to doubt votes on individual bills matter most of the time. What does matter are the persona and values you project. If you come across as a bleeding heart, and you're trying to win in Ohio or Iowa, then votes aren't going to save you. If you come across as a person who disdains hippie and woke stuff, then you can vote no on right-wing bills and get away with it. But even if you don't need to vote a certain way to project a normie-friendly persona and values, you do still have to do *something* to *affirmatively* project that persona and those values. You can't just rely on having a good bio and "looking Middle American" and avoiding gaffes. You have to be out in the media and showing people that street crime makes you angry (or whatever).
4. However, there are occasionally situations where a vote *can* matter politically, and where Dem congressmembers need to recognize that the Republicans have them cornered on public opinion and to avoid direct conflict. And recognizing when these situations have arisen can be a hard call.
5. In light of that, I don't think Dems who voted yes on the Riley bill should be punished for it, *even if* it was the wrong call, and especially if they're running in swing states and swing districts. (Now if one wants to punish someone like Fetterman, that's different, because there's clearly a lot more going on there. But if the person is generally a Dem in good standing, then people need to give them space.)
I tend to agree with this in regards to ICE, my anecdote data in talking to libertarian republicans in Oklahoma, a group that are genuine swing voters is that the ICE response is a big personal freedom and fed government overreach. I think there is something here that these are not cultural issues, these are policy issues.
Yes, and this clarified a bit of my disagreement with Matt and why I am less pessimisstic than he is. I think he understates the degree to which Dem voters are responding this way specifically because of antipathy to Trump, rather than ideological positioning.
> I hate Matt’s opinions on this because he’s been consistently wrong about the danger of Trump, about how far Trump would go, and about the need to confront Trump on these abuses.
Sorry but unless you're new to Matt's writing this is just an incredible lack of reading comprehension.
God the lack of quality in this comment amazes me. If you’re going to take the time and bandwidth to reply with a criticism, please also take the time to spell out what your detailed criticism is.
> People find this to be very strange, but I sincerely believe that Donald Trump is extremely bad and that the most important thing in American politics is to defeat him and his movement which means the opposition party should try to take more popular stands.
And back to your own:
> The cost of Matt’s myopia here is that his inability to perceive and counter these serious threats also reduces the credibility of his more moderate policy proposals. Pretending this is “culture” is not the right way forwards.
This just screams "person with poor reading comprehension to me".
Looking at Matt's examples in the article:
* The Laken Riley act was going to pass no matter what. This was during the so called vibe shift when everybody was mad about illegal immigration and I understand why many frontline members voted for it.
* Tom Suozzi: Nobody outside their district should know who this person is. After some brief searching "Cook rates NY-3 as Lean Democratic rather than safely Democratic, and explicitly notes the race could get more competitive depending on whether Republicans put real resources into it." despite the seat being pretty Blue leaning. Either way, him changing his vote wouldn't have changed out outcome, though all the frontline democrats deciding to die on this hill would've changed it.
If you actually zoom out though (I know this is hard), the Democrats keep losing seats because of an unwillingness to put up a candidates who are a match for public opinion in many seats, and unless this changes we are going to be left in a spot where we are even more powerless.
Thank you for posting a comment with actual content. Don’t you feel better about this than your original content-free criticism?
I've written several comments above that expand on my point, and I think if you read them you'll find that my point was fairly clear. Yes, I accept Matt's thesis that the Dems should moderate on some positions (or allow more ideological diversity) as a means be more electorally viable. No, I do not think that this applies to *all* positions. I believe that you can devise a principled test to think about which positions should be flexible and which ones shouldn't. I don't think Matt is doing that very effectively: he's just electoral-maxxing without thinking deeply about the implications of these compromises.
I think the older version of Matt (I've been reading him since the early 2000s) would have been articulate enough to devise a test. He would separate positions on which the Democratic party should allow ideological diversity, from other positions that are genuinely essential to Democratic party goals. I would say that "being willing to implement essential reforms, such as dismantling the unaccountable police force called ICE" would fall into the second category. Any Dem candidate (particularly one in a *blue-leaning district*!!!) that isn't on-board with opposing ICE and Laken Riley, simply isn't going to be able to take those strong stances. This will seriously weaken any post-election Democratic coalition, and the base is right to punish this.
Now obviously we could debate what positions are "essential" to the Democratic party's post-election agenda. I'd be open to hearing Matt opine on that. His stances so far have been wishy-washy on this issue. On the *policy* matter, he's clearly stated that getting rid of ICE is the right strategy. He just seems unwilling to make any sort of political compromise to ensure that this actually happens.
And unfortunately, for these essential reforms to happen, Dem voters need confidence that a candidate like Suozzi will be willing to make courageous votes *after we win the election*. Can I draw such confidence from his past votes, symbolic or not? No, I cannot. And the voters clearly cannot. Even worse, Suozzi holding those positions and being allowed to vote them sends a strong signal that the party is unable to enforce discipline on its members, which also tells potential donors and voters that a post-election Democratic party will be as ineffective as the pre-Trump Democratic party. This is a deadly liability, and the Democrats cannot afford to be viewed this way.
TLDR: contra Matt, thermostatic public opinion and the unpopularity of Trump are already doing most of the work that Matt says we needed to compromise for. This doesn't mean that compromises are unnecessary, but they can't make the Democratic party unable to implement critical reforms. We need serious policy thinkers, especially influential pundits who can think about those policies and convince political Democrats to pre-commit to them. This should be where someone like Matt Y. shines! It used to be where he shines. Unfortunately he's vanished into what feels like a cloud of fear, where he's willing to compromise on anything just to win the next election -- even the effectiveness of the winning coalition.
Thank you for posting a comment with actual content. Don’t you feel better about this than your original content-free criticism?
To be frank, no. Not a very high ROI use of my time.
I think your follow up is good, and I agree with a lot of your points.
That being said, you didn’t prove your initial assertion about Matt underrating Trump’s danger, just that you disagree on strategy.
And like a few folks on here (and all over Twitter) we’re back to the “Trump is acting so stupidly that we might be able to be fine for this one particular election”. That got Biden elected the last time, but it’s not a formula for sustained success, and instead sets up for continued failure in the future. Trump’s current immigration approach is under water, but it would be easy for him (if he was psychologically capable) to just chill out 20% and have it be broadly popular. A future Republican could still do that and Democrats need to figure out a way to stop the excesses while strongly signaling that they are opposed to what happened during the Biden administration.
I feel the same about yours, they just have more words. You made a major claim about Matt. Let’s back it up with something other than “he didn’t think this vote on this bill is as important as I think it is.”
He has explained his theory of how to stop Trump over and over again and while I don’t agree with every sentence he says or on every vote, you’re claims are still histrionic and unsupported.
Someone who is genuinely worried about Trump would be acting more like Matt than like the average Democrat.
I've always had a huge problem with the cognitive dissonance that people have where they believe bad things will happen in a society at large but our small communities of friends, family or self will be spared any inconvenience. It's a common trap people fall into because they don't think deeply or they are so plainly irritated.
That said, I still think that Golden could've won re-election if he tried to run, and I feel like Angie Craig can still win in MN. We still have to have elections, I think Dems are mostly upset by what they seem as the lack of "fight" against MAGA and Trump and the desire by some moderates to do business as usual in that sense. It also doesn't help that too many people like MY, people in Congress or progressives specifically seem over indexed to social media and speaking on their loud speakers. They aren't representative of their actual constituents in most cases.
I do think MY is on to something though when he discussed the lack of real party leadership, and how Progressives still haven't learned the lessons of moderates winning more elections than "The Squad".
"I've always had a huge problem with the cognitive dissonance that people have where they believe bad things will happen in a society at large but our small communities of friends, family or self will be spared any inconvenience."
I mean, I guess this depends how you define 'society at large' and 'inconvenience' but I think the people believing that are mostly right? Like, the first trump administration involved a lot of bad things for society at large, but for me (and I'm guessing most folks) he didn't actually cause me or mine any personal harm.
What a banger of a Q/A column from Matt this morning. In addition to the answer that Ryan highlights, the gun control answer, the Amazon takedown, and the comments on the doomed history of Israeli olive branches are all column-worthy.
I think the dynamic Matt describes of a Democratic voting base which refuses to accept a majoritarian political strategy is a terrible risk for the country. Unless some emergent dynamic sweeps that away, the conclusion I come to is that it will be many elections before we have an effective, responsible political party, one that leads a majority of citizens to a better future. If that's the case, then the work for those of us who love our country is to build the electorate and the party that can resolve the tension between majoritarian institutions and our deeply unpopular core beliefs, by replacing most of the latter.
Yes, the problem with this strategy is that it very well may win the midterms but it is also blatantly a "rooting against America" strategy. Hoping for a mess the Democrats will manage better than the Republicans is pretty easy to condemn as immoral.
It also won’t work well enough to give Democrats the margins they need to do some necessary structural change.
I am a pro-choice feminists. States can keep making their own abortion laws. I think Americans are idiots about guns, but put a hand gun in every pot if need be.
We need to new anti-corruption laws. We need to get rid of the filibuster and expand Congress. We need to reform the federal courts. We need to regulate social media or we will perish.
Yes, the problem with this strategy is that it very well may win the midterms but it is also blatantly a "rooting against America" strategy. Hoping for a mess the Democrats will manage better than the Republicans is pretty easy to condemn as immoral.
The man show is such an interesting example, because, like South Park, there was a moderating irony hiding a fundamental liberalism at its core. Jimmy Kimmel was one of the hosts! And more importantly, their writers rooms were full of the same kind of grad school/artist types who normally take those jobs, and their ideas percolated through. Obviously this was completely lost on plenty of guys who watched it, which is what drove part of the 2010s backlash against ironic racism and misogyny, but it's hard to argue that replacing them with a bunch of the biggest freaks on the planet was a change for the better.
I was just writing a comment up on this, but you beat me to it. It was so weird in that on the surface it always struck me in real time as icky and sexist, but it was unclear as to how seriously it should be taken. And given the different career trajectories of Kimmel and Carollo, maybe even they didnt entirely know collectively...
I remember even watching at the time I got the sense that Kimmel was in on the meta joke and Carolla wasn't. Their subsequent trajectories seem to have borne that out.
Exactly. I have a friend who *loathed* that show, and she *hated* when Kimmel became a night show host....only to be very pleasantly surprised on how his show turned out.
I used to listen to him on KROQ Loveline in high school. I never got the sense he was sexist, especially by 1990s standards. But that was 30 years ago and I haven't checked if his brain's been fried in the last decade.
I think Chappelle Show might be a better example from this era. There's plenty of stuff to appeal to young men (Great Moments In Hook Up History etc) while also sharp political insight with stuff like the blind klansman and Black Bush (which holds up remarkably well in the Age of Trump) or even making fun of crudish male behavior as being ultimately pathetic not alpha like "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" or "Let me holla at ya girl!" See also Season 1-3 of The Boondocks
> U.N. , you got problem with that? You know what you should do? You should sanction me. Sanction me with your army. Oh! wait a minute! You don't have an army! So I guess that means you need to shut the f*** up! That's what I would do if I don't have an army, I would shut the f*** up. Shut, the, f***, up!. That's right! Kofi Annan, you think I'm going to take orders from an African? You might speak sixteen languages, but you gonna need them when you in Times Square selling fake hats. And I know fake Gucci when I see it, n**** I'm rich!
Maybe I was in the wrong circles, but when I was in college and hanging out with guys, people would bring up Chappelle all the time, while no one would ever actually reference an actual joke on The Man Show. The show was more a vibe than something anybody seemed to remember the next morning.
Chappelle had interesting things to say at times (and plenty of juvenile stuff as well), Man Show really didn't (literally young women jumping on trampolines)
Best way I can describe it is a semi-satirical revival of raunchy '80s humor. It's kayfabe, like pro wrestling. I never saw more than a few episodes because it felt like it was targeted at teenagers. (I was a few years too old to appreciate the humor on its own and a few years too young to appreciate it as a throwback).
It will surprise no one that Joe Rogan took over after Kimmel and Carolla left.
“Firearms deaths in the United States are mostly suicides, and gun homicides are overwhelmingly committed with small, cheap, easily concealed handguns—not ‘assault weapons.’
But when people pivot from that to ‘therefore preventing suicides is a major policy priority,’ an assumption is doing a lot of work.
The modal suicide isn’t a teenager in a transient crisis. It’s a middle-aged or older man, often divorced or otherwise socially disconnected, and frequently dealing with depression, substance use, or both.
That doesn’t mean these deaths are inevitable. But it does raise a harder question: how many suicides are short-term, reversible crises versus expressions of longer-running decline that we don’t have good tools to address?
If it’s mostly the former, then means restriction and crisis intervention make sense. If a large share is the latter, then simply ‘preventing the act’ risks treating the symptom while ignoring the actual harm.
It’s mostly the former. Suicide is mostly an impulsive thing that people attempt within 72 hours or less of deciding they want to take their own life. There is some “diversion” to other measures when one method of killing your self is no longer available but the net effect is to reduce overall suicides (based on a study of the UK banning a certain kind of gas stove).
In Canada, MAID has made it clear that providing an accessible and humane framework for suicide will increase demand.
It’s noteworthy that relatively few people choose death purely because of mental illness. Poverty and loneliness are big factors, but only a pretty small slice of Canadians who don’t have a very serious physical illness choose to die.
"In Canada, MAID has made it clear that providing an accessible and humane framework for suicide will increase demand" by people in the system encouraging others to kill themselves.
People are often troublesome and if you can get them to kill themselves and make your problems go away, it appears that's a good option for some.
Older data found that most completed suicides were in people without mental illness. Newer data has found that most completed suicides are in people without mental illness mental illness but this eeems to be related to expanding definitions of mental illness (so on many cases the mental illness is not severe or serious) and researchers and coroners taking a completed suicide as proof of mental illness.
I guess my point is that we need a good understanding of the actual problem and current research is making that difficult
It doesn't make sense, but our best evidence indicates that it doesn't really matter, depriving people of an easy way of committing suicide results in those suicides mostly not happening.
The most striking version of this is the transition from high-CO domestic gas supplies to low-CO in the UK during the 1960s. (Sticking your head in an unlit oven kills you very reliably if your natural gas has a lot of CO in it, but it doesn't work if your natural gas doesn't come with CO.) Over the period from 1960-1970, suicides due to gas went effectively to zero, but suicides via other means stayed basically flat (they went up slightly in women and the young, down slightly among elderly men). There's no reason to believe that gas suicides were somehow only being done by those with short-term crises rather than longer-running decline, but we don't see those suicides shifting to other methods, they just disappear.
As I said, it's intuitive that some subset of people who commit suicide would do it by another means if you take away their preferred one, but as far as the evidence shows, it's also mostly wrong. If you make it harder to commit suicide by some easy means, most people don't shift to some other method, they just don't kill themselves.
Maybe this is TMI, but as someone who went through a severe bout of suicidal ideation many years ago, this definitely fits in with my lived experience. The thought process I would go through in the worst moments was always to go through a list of what would be the methods that were easiest to access, quickest, least painful, most likely to be successful, etc. It was extremely difficult to find anything that fit all those criteria, and I'm glad there wasn't a gun readily available because that would have probably been an easy method. But it wasn't like I was going to go out and try to buy a gun with all the process that involves, because a big part of depression, typically, is that you also have a real lack of motivation. You think about suicide, but if it's not easy and readily available, it often remains just a thought and doesn't turn into action.
The experience of San Francisco with the suicide net on the Golden Gate Bridge is another good example that is similar to that natural gas oven example in the UK. The Golden Gate Bridge was one of the most notorious places for suicides in the entire US, a massive rate of suicides per year, and the netting was hotly debated. Many people said it would just cause people to do it some other way. But the evidence seems to have been that suicide rates overall declined once this very obvious, very easy, very effective method had been removed as an option.
The data I’m aware for the US supports this. People without guns try less lethal methods and are likely to survive (often by changing their minds after taking pills, etc.). Guns are uniquely bad because they’re so lethal and convenient for people who have them.
Anecdotally, I work in an inpatient mental health facility and many of our clients have past suicide attempts. I don’t recall anyone who tried with a gun. Those people don’t appear to have a chance to change their minds and get treatment.
I think the question here that always puzzles anti-gun people is: what need? If you're escorting your kids to school in the Aleutian Islands and need to protect them from Kodiak bears, sure, that seems like a need. But generally, being a "good guy with a gun" absolutely does not protect you from criminals with guns.
This is actually not true. there are many many many documented cases each year where serious crime is prevented or stopped because of an armed citizen.
My problem with these studies is that there are usually multiple things wrong with the basic premises. To persuade me that you need a gun for self-defense, you would have to prove that using a gun for self-defense is more effective than other methods of self-defense. In fact, you'd have to prove that using a gun for self-defense is so much more effective that it offsets the additional risk of death and injury that the gun's presence adds to the situation. The absolute number of defensive gun uses tells me nothing about this type of analysis. All it tells me is that a bunch of people got out their guns when faced with a situation they thought was a potential crime.
My experience in urban areas with gangs tells me that the presence of armed people usually turns fist fights into murders. Let's just say a guy is trying to mug someone. If neither of them have a gun (say the mugger has a knife), the mugger either succeeds or the victim runs away. The crime could be successful, but no one gets shot. If the mugger has a gun, the crime is much more likely to succeed, since running from a knife is much safer than running from a gun. Sometimes the gun will go off accidentally and someone will die; this is how one of my friends died while I was a teenager. If both the mugger and the victim have guns, it's possible that the victim can scare off the mugger, but it's pretty likely that they never have a chance to get their gun out because the mugger has the first-mover advantage and is much more likely to be used to pointing the gun at people than a law-abiding citizen. The mugger might try to shoot first out of fear for their life. Additionally, if they get in a fire fight, stray bullets can kill and injure bystanders; this is how a 7-year-old girl was killed when I was a teenager, because she was practicing piano near the front window and the stray bullet killed her. In any case, this situation is very chaotic; it could result in the victim successfully deterring their attacker, but I think it's also pretty likely that multiple people get shot.
The only situation that seems really likely to be helped by the "good guy with a gun" is if the mugger isn't armed and the victim is. That seems like the least likely scenario to me, but it's possible. Also not guaranteed to work, because sometimes criminals notice the gun and steal it as well, or struggle over it and the gun goes off unpredictably.
These scenarios just change a lot with any other self-defense strategy. Pepper spray, tasers, self-defense techniques, even knives and crowbars- none of these have stray bullet problems.
This is aside from the fact that I think when gun owners are surveyed about their defensive gun uses, I doubt them as reliable narrators. I've seen enough guys "prevent fights" by flashing their guns after they've said something that normally would've started something to wonder whether a lot of the crimes they "prevent" are things that would've deescalated prior to crime-level if no one was armed. It's hard to measure that kind of counterfactual- someone would have to have a very cleverly designed study to persuade me on that front.
1. Hunting is a huge cultural thing for much of the country
2. Guns & shooting are a fun hobby. People get into upgrading their rifles, the same way car enthusiasts like to hotrod their cars. There's a whole aftermarket ecosystem for ARs, etc.
3. You have zero self-defense needs, really? If a violent criminal broke into my house at night and threatened my family I could defend them. What would you do?
1. It's an increasingly niche hobby- only around 5% of Americans hunt nowadays. That said, I don't object to it. If a person has a hunting license, I have no objection to them owning guns that are suitable for hunting, especially since those are generally not handguns.
2. I understand that this is true, but you have to understand that it is totally unsympathetic to people like me. It's like saying that you have a poison hobby and spend a lot of time concocting ever more lethal poisons. I get that people find it fun, but having something in your house that can easily kill you where its only purpose is fun or killing stuff seems a little deranged to me.
3. Home invasion by strangers is while residents are home is exceptionally rare. Generally when someone wants to rob your house, they scout for a while beforehand to make sure that you're not going to be home when they come. I also have a dog who is noisy, which deters people from invading my house because they don't want her to wake up the whole neighborhood. In the very unlikely event that someone did invade my home, I'd prefer to barricade myself in a defensible room and use a heavy object to bludgeon the person if they managed to get through the barricade, because my assumption is that this person would be invading at night and I am much more confident in my ability to whack someone in the head with my trusty crowbar than I am in my ability to definitely shoot the invader and not any of my relatives in the dark. Also, the crowbar does not require unlocking and loading it to be available for self-defense, but I would certainly not be comfortable with a gun easily accesible for self-defense in a house in which toddlers live.
1. Aside from my skepticism that the average hunter is responding to surveys, your 6% (it's not 5%) number just measures a single year. My best estimate is that 30% of Americans have ever hunted in their lives
2. 'Poison hobby' is exactly what alcohol is- do you drink? Maybe socially with your friends or family? Perhaps it's been a part of socializing throughout your life, woven into family events, weddings, catching up with friends, celebrations, wakes, birthdays, etc.? Because alcohol kills more than 3-5x the number of Americans than guns do every year, once you measure not just immediate deaths but homicides, car crashes, domestic violence, etc. It doesn't seem 'deranged' to you because it's a normalized part of your culture..... perhaps you seem my point
(Also people enjoy working on cars even though car crashes kill more people every year than guns, etc.)
3. There appear to be slightly more than a million burglaries every year *when the homeowner is present in the home*. Or slightly more than a quarter of all burglaries. I'm sure it's easy to theorize about how you'd perform with a crowbar in hand at extreme close range, where the other guy (who probably has a lot more street fighting experience) can simply grab you and take it away
So, while I agree a teenage suicide is more tragic than an 85 year-old man with cancer killing himself (although the latter is still mortifying, my 2x great grandpa did this and his family had to find him with his head blown off, don't do it guys), the problem of old man suicide isn't completely intractable, it just probably requires family intervention. If grandpa lives alone in a rural area, somebody in the family should offer to hold his guns for him and if he wants to go hunting or something, it can be a family event.
I would have liked to help my grandmother end her suffering but wasn’t willing to risk prison.
Even absent terminal illness, older men face problems that are not very tractable. Sixty percent of single women over 40 don’t want a partner. This number increases with age. So if you get divorced and are middle aged and aren’t particularly rich or charming, you are likely to be very lonely. And that’s before your body starts falling apart.
Data on suicide attempts vs completion is poor, but based on available data, that gap in relationship availability isn’t necessarily explanatory. Women are believed to attempt suicide more often than men, but choose less lethal means.
Never ran into that as somebody who works in mental health with a population with high suicide attempt rates. People are in real pain and don't see a way out, so they try to kill themselves. My clients didn't use guns, so they're alive, but they were quite sincere in their pain.
- Use a wakizashi, because it is the proper way to do it.
- Do it sitting on a tatami mat for comfort.
- Nominate a close friend as kaishakunin to decapitate me with a single blow of a sword at the correct moment, leaving my head hanging by a thin strand of connective tissue to prevent an unsightly roll.
There was a period where "deaths of despair" where a major thing discussed in political circles but it mostly seems to have burnt itself out, perhaps because a lot of the fentanyl crisis also burnt itself out with the deaths of its victims.
Why? I guess I can think of individual situations in which suicide is a bad choice, but I can think of many situations in which suicide seems acceptable.
For example, a terminal cancer patient in extreme pain with weeks to live and zero chance of recovery. Why would it be immoral for them to commit suicide?
Yes, Sharon’s stroke probably made zero difference.
But Olmert ran (and won) on a platform of withdrawing from the West Bank (right after the Gaza withdrawal)… not sure the lame duck aspect had anything to do with it. (The only way Sharon’s stroke makes a difference is if he somehow averts the 2006 Lebanon war, which scuttled the plan.)
It’s really not like lame ducks were sneaking in peace plans and then the population was saying “wait, what, no!!! we never expected this!”
If you look at the Israeli right’s rhetoric about these deals, moreover, it’s always “they’re lying and will use any inch of land for more terror,” not “god has given us East Jerusalem.” There are good reasons to despise these guys, but the history of Oslo and unilateral withdrawals has proven this particular diagnosis correct.
It’s also not even really true that religion is the *biggest* source of intractability on the Palestinian side. It’s right of return. In a way, the right of return is actually the essence of the Palestinian national myth, the same way that the basis for our national myth is embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
At this point, it’s obvious that the pitch for any peace deal will have to be “despite the increased danger, you should do this because it’s moral” rather than “this will actually bring peace” (because it won’t).
A more accurate diagnosis would be: there was a constituency for “land in exchange for peace,” but never “land in exchange for war.” You can fault Israelis for this, but it will be refreshing if everyone is honest that these are the stakes.
You're just wrong on this. Religion is the driver of the conflict. The swing votes on both sides are held by religious nuts, and a lot of other people know that elite liberal society doesn't like religious justifications so they conceal them. But when you hear an ostensibly secular Jew say "why shouldn't we get to build houses in Judea?", 90%+ of the time that person actually thinks the invisible man in the sky wants the Muslims out and just won't admit it.
Similarly while obviously dumb leftism is one driver of Palestinian nationalism, a whole bunch of the people in the anti-Zionist movement are just obvious radical Islamists. Plus, the Left loves defending radical Islam simply because it is anti-Western.
Religion is the major reason the conflict is so difficult to solve. The world's irrational, woo-filled, narrowminded jerks concentrate on the region.
One other thing- right to return IS religion. It's actually a fantasy about civil war. The notion isn't "we'll return and live in peace with the Jews". Literally everyone who is not an idiot knows the point of right of return is to re-run the 1948 civil war with Jews either fleeing the war zone or losing to the Palestinians this time. Which gets back to this conflict being driven by religious nuts.
I sympathize with your point in a sense — religious nut jobs are certainly causing a huge share of the problems right now. I’ll try to explain why my diagnosis is nevertheless that religion is not the ultimate source of the conflict.
On the Arab side, the current Islamist war on Israel has deep roots in an older idea, which is kind of a “Make Arabia Great Again” attitude that emerged in the late 19th century. You can find Islamic scholars writing about this going way back, but this ideology has also had secular manifestations, like pan-Arabism. Right now Islamism is the dominant *means* to this end because the “muqawama” ideology and tactics have allowed it to succeed where pan-Arabism failed. Islamism can persist through the utter destruction of societies, since it views that as redemption.
At bottom, though, I see this from their side as being about reversing the Nakba (properly understood as the catastrophe, the humiliation, rather than how it’s understood in the West).
From the Israeli side, yes, agreed that religious crazies are responsible for the gravest abuses in the West Bank, enabled by the crazies controlling the police/security. But I think that even absent the crazies, we don’t have a withdrawal from the occupation (although we probably would from the far-out settlements).
How many secular Jews do you know who would accept the following terms: leave the West Bank, and be repaid in rivers of blood? A third terrorist group will emerge on your borders. Keep in mind that Israelis will have to fight under the “mulligan” principle — those terrorists will be able to try again and again without ever losing land. My guess is that it’s not only religious Jews who would reject this.
Most conflicts like this get solved with a deal, despite everyone having their historical theories. Think the British and Irish don't have historical theories?
The difference is that this conflict is driven and fed by religious nuts.
"Most conflicts like this get solved with a deal,"
No they don't. Most conflicts get resolved because one side wins and the other side is either destroyed, absorbed, or leaves. Two groups in conflict over the same land has rarely if ever been resolved with a deal.
India and Pakistan have battles but in actuality the cold peace between them is a fabulous accomplishment that has allowed India to become a major economic power.
There usually is a deal even if it's just implicit, but it's a deal where the losing side understands it has lost and settles for a permanent lesser outcome.
Sure. If you want to describe one side winning and forcing the other side to leave and/or take whatever scraps the winner leaves them as a "deal" then okay. But group conflict over land has historically been extremely fierce and brutal, regardless of motivation and ethnic/religious/etc. "cleansing" has been the historical norm, not the exception.
I guess I’d distinguish general nuttery from religious nuttery. I really struggle to understand the preferences of a Palestinian nationalist who prefers to continue fighting. Like, the PA won’t give up on right of return. Seems insane to me — why not surrender? I understand the secular Jewish preferences I described above much better, but not the “let’s conquer the Wild West Bank.”
Keep in mind, also, that although most conflicts eventually resolve, some last hundreds of years! (Eg Greeks vs Turks.)
Even if Pals all of a sudden adopted the dispositions of Danes, the conflict would not end because Israel wants to evict or ghettoize all Arabs in the West Bank until they eventually take it over. Probably would have been better off either pushing the Arabs over the Jordan back in 1948 or leaving the WB to Jordan.
Israeli society has always been split, though not evenly, about their weighting of territorial integrity and Jewish sovereignty. The majority (my estimate is ~2/3) has for a long time tended to value Jewish sovereignty, and was willing to give up territorial claims for that. The remaining 1/3 was committed to the territorial integrity of Israel.
This was the case during the Yishuv, when the majority Labor Zionists agreed to the Peel Commission Plan and the Partition plans. This was true during the pace agreement with Egypt and the return of Sinai. This was true during the peace process in the 1990s and the 2000s.
What happened is that the Second Intifada, and the repeated attacks from Lebanon and Gaza after Israel's respective withdrawals from these places made it clear to Israelis that a Palestinian state would be used as a launching point for terror. It convinced Israelis that the Palestinian national movement prioritizes destroying Zionism than building a stable, prosperous state for Palestinians beside Israel. For Gaza, withdrawal meant putting primarily far-flung kibbutzim and border towns at risk. For the West Bank, which is on Jerusalem's municipal boundary and on higher ground overlooking Ben Gurion Airport and Tel Aviv, the security situation is more dire.
So the debate now isn't between territorial integrity or Jewish sovereignty. Both approaches of negotiation of the peace process and unilateral action did not succeed in separating Israel from the Palestinians. So people are convinced that to maintain Israeli security, you need control of the territories.
The security considerations have changed, but the underlying ideology hasn't. If the security threats went away, and Israelis could trust that a Palestinian state would not be used as a launching pad for terror, with the ultimate goal of the elimination of Israel and the vulnerability of its citizens, a majority (my guess is 2/3) will go back to supporting a 2-state for 2-peoples solution, in which Israel relinquishes the control of the vast majority of the West Bank.
I don't think this comment reflects a realistic understanding of Israeli society. Israelis will not deploy their sons to the West Bank and Gaza, putting them in danger and preventing their society from dealing with more pressing problems (Lebanon, Iran), purely for the sake of being mean to Arabs. It's hard to overstate how sensitive this society is to military casualties and hostages.
Yes, Israelis want the West Bank. Many want it badly. However, they currently have only a very small piece of it, and much of the desire to conquer the territory comes from the fact that it would add strategic depth to Israel.
If Palestinians could credibly commit to peace, and used that as a bargaining chip for a deal, it would immediately be popular in Israel. (Also, the entire issue of evacuating settlements would become somewhat moot, since these Danes would get along much better with any Jewish stragglers left behind in the new Palestinian state.)
One thing to contemplate though: if Palestinians *unilaterally* committed to peace without striking a deal, then the conflict would likely continue until the Israelis felt satisfied. I think it's worth it for liberals to keep this in mind when suggesting various unilateral moves Israel could make to defuse the conflict.
There were but the Troubles becoming an ethnic conflict rather than a religious conflict was such a thing you got regular jokes about being asked if you're a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist. For the most part it wasn't driven by any real theology, major figures in the IRA/Sinn Fein/UVF/DUP weren't motivated by religious belief. The religion was mostly used as a proxy for the ethnic groups, Catholicism was mostly used by the descendents of the original Irish and Protestantism was mostly used by the descendents of the Scottish planter class.
The Troubles is probably a bad example here though because understanding it properly requires a fairly deep understanding of Irish history and the European wars of religion and does have religious links.
A big, gaping difference between Northern Ireland and Historic Palestine is simply that while Catholics and Protestants have religious differences, neither side thinks Ulster is Holy Land given to them by God.
So while obviously religion is a big part of the story of the Troubles, it's still relatively straightforward to secularize and then compromise on the conflict.
In Historic Palestine, THE big thing that prevents that is religion. Both sides literally think that a deity gave them the land to the exclusion of the other.
Yes, this is what the right of return is about. It’s an attempt to create a majority Palestinian state in Israel and end the state. That’s why it is often coupled with an end to the Jewish right of return.
“But when you hear an ostensibly secular Jew say "why shouldn't we get to build houses in Judea?", 90%+ of the time that person actually thinks the invisible man in the sky wants the Muslims out and just won't admit it.”
Doubtful. You’re discounting that they could easily be completely secular and think it’s just better for the Jews to control the whole area given that the Palestinians will misuse any control they have.
How many Israelis even care about preserving some homeland for the Palestinian people at this point? Gaza was always the bit of land the Israelis didn’t care about and look what happened there when the Palestinians were left to their devices.
No, it's religious. Actual secular Jews know that building houses in Judea makes Israeli security worse. It's about the sky fairy giving Jews the land.
But that’s just not true. Yisrael Beiteinu (originally founded to represent the interests of post-Soviet immigrants) is one of the most assertively secular Jewish political parties and one of the most opposed to giving up the West Bank because secular prime ministers on both the left and right realized that the most cost-effective way to house one million immigrants in the 80s and 90s was to dump them in cinder block apartments in the occupied territories. This leads to wild cases where the party’s more moderate, pro-two-state solution wing envisions massive border redrawing so that they’re within Israel and the majority-Arab regions in the Galilee and Negev end up in Palestine.
The fact is that there are two separate pro-settlement blocs: one is religious and sees them in messianic terms and one is largely secular and sees it primarily as a housing issue.
So Beiteinu are faking their hardline support for eliminating religious education, abolishing ultra orthodox draft exemptions, and introducing civil marriage and greater protections for immigrants’ non-Jewish spouses—all to obtain the support of overwhelmingly secular voters who disproportionately live in secular West Bank settlements—because their Soviet immigrant leadership are secretly Orthodox? Or Shimon Peres spent nine decades pretending to be secular (when that secularism was what caused the Dirty Trick—his biggest political maneuver—to fail) so no one would realize that the settlements he had the government build, completely separate from the ones constructed by grassroots orthodox movements, were an attempt to initiate the messianic age?
There’s already so much to hate about Israel’s secular right and places like Ariel. I cannot imagine why you would choose to believe something obviously untrue about them, when that (I.e, messianic Orthodoxy) already applies to plenty of other, separate, detestable things about the occupation.
Separating the ethno-centric nuts and the religio-centric nuts seems like not that useful an exercise. Matt has a couple of hobby horse theories he's trying to discourse lawyer for, which is his prerogative.
There's an interesting dynamic on how anti-peace deal factions on both sides can easily defect and weaken the pro-deal faction on the otherside to block a deal. But that's mostly orthogonal to the particular ideologies.
In this case of the Israelis you've got one of the few surviving Iron Age village gods telling them that they're the Chosen People and as proof you've got the Old Testament spinning tales of land theft and genocide that somehow justify the current position.
Maybe we should just stop pretending they're a Western state and instead treat them like we would Saudi Arabia.
The problem with that is they are a Western state.
I know at this point gay rights is almost a cliche in Israel discourse, but it matters that gay people can basically live free lives in Israel and they can't in Muslim states in the region. Or that Israel has a free press and the neighboring countries do not. Or that Israel is a successful, tech-friendly, democratic, capitalist society and some of the countries in the region are elitist petrostate monarchies.
None of that is a justification for the settlers or the Israeli right or the resistance to peace initiatives, but it is, fundamentally, a truism that Israel is in fact not Saudi Arabia.
I don't think this will produce the outcome you want. If the US started treating Israel like they treat Saudi Arabia, they would be even more solicitous of their interests, potentially create bases within the country to defend them, excuse any human rights violations they make in the interest of the broader relationship, and have regular groups of people paid by Israel found think tanks and write opinion pieces defending the country. Saudi Arabia has huge influence and sway in American political and economic decision-making. Maybe that's what you want, but I doubt it.
Well what I'd really like to do is treat them like Iran (minus the bombing) since I think they're only a few decades away from that. Boomer Israel will be long dead by then and the idiots who mandate that elevator buttons don't work on Saturday will be running absolutely everything.
Not trying to "achieve" anything, just tearing down the pretense that they're more like Americans than say the Japanese or Koreans.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are not the same kind of state. For one thing, Saudi Arabia is a monarchy where the monarchy has real power and has entered into a relationship of convenience with radical Wahhabi clerics, while keeping the military weak and ineffective. Iran is a theocratic republic with semi-democratic elections and a strong military partially independent of the rest of the state.
Ethnocentrism is a lot easier to cut a deal over (it has happened numerous times in human history) as opposed to dividing up the land that an imaginary but fervently believed in deity literally "gave" to one or the other religious group.
By the way Dilan, I read your megathread [https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1950106310504071380] on debunking common religious claims earlier this week, and wanted to say to you that I liked it. It was well laid out without getting into New Atheist style smuggery.
I'll look forward to it. I don't know how much you care to publish on your Substack, but it would also be cool to read it there, free of some of the friction that tweets have.
Fair. I'm not saying one or the other, it's just sometimes more difficult to find certain things to look up on the Twitter thread. But certainly understandable if doing both is too much work for you.
While there is a segment of Israeli society religiously committed to complete territorial integrity, this segment (mostly from the Dati leumi community) has always been the minority.
Even the most hard line of these people who want to settle the land for religious reasons only settle the part of the land under IDF protection. They don’t settle area A, or Jordan or Lebanon.
The point is that the right wing objected to the concessions because they feared that Palestinians would use their newly established state to create a launching pad for terror.
Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza (done by the center right against the objections of the rest of the right) has proved these concerns correct, as much as it pains me to admit it as a liberal Zionist who believes in self determination for Palestinian Arabs.
I think you're right that the intractability on the Israeli side (ignoring the Palestinian side for the moment) is that mistreating Palestinians does indeed make Israel better off. The reason not to mistreat the Palestinians is that it's immoral, not that the lives of Israelis would be better off if they treated Palestinians better.
Not precisely what Unset was asking for, but I recently read and enjoyed Luka Jukic's book "Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea" about the history of central Europe (the region and the concept), in which the Austrian Habsburgs obviously feature quite heavily.
To be fair(?), those kinds of shoddy books actually predate AI by a decade or maybe more, but they used to be made by literally just compiling a bunch of relevant Wikipedia pages into a printed volume. I think AI is just making them less encyclopedia-like and smoothing the content into something more like a traditional history book.
The #1 problem with moderates is that they keep doing stupid and/or evil shit and then expecting voters to excuse it with "well, they're moderate." Sorry, no. Being a moderate isn't license to undergo a brain amputation and replace it with nowcast polling.
The Laken Riley Act was a horrible piece of legislation, as basically every one of the law-talkin guys pointed out at the time. Moderates decided to pass it in order to... what, get one or two slightly less bad news cycles? The reward calculus was all effed up there. Similarly, the decision to fund the Trump government without condition in March 2025 looks almost unimaginably bad at this point, with the DHS shutdown having genuinely produced positive results and, conversely, the Trumpists having completely ignored Democratic funding priorities in implementing the March unilateral surrender. Suozzi, instead of sack-dancing about correctly calling the unpopularity of the trans-women-in-women's-sports issue, is desperately trying to justify his dumbass behavior on ICE funding.
(As an aside, it's not actually clear to me who supposedly "hounded" Jared Golden out of Congress. Maybe this is some widely acknowledged thing among Congress-knowers, like "the Groups," that normies just are out of touch with. If so, it would be useful to know that. So far all I've seen is some whining from Golden personally.)
My preference in red areas would be for Dems who are substantively moderate but procedurally tenacious. But I will vote for a procedurally tenacious leftist every day of the week and twice on Sunday over a substantive moderate who won't actually have the courage of their convictions. Letting elected officials cook is an unacceptable strategy when they keep serving up moose turd pie.
Yeah if the moderates were doing a solid job holding the line it'd be one thing but they're performatively finding extremely unwise places to surrender which just makes moderation seem like capitulation rather than any kind of wisdom.
Politicians in general drastically overrate the importance of votes to their political survival. I don't know if this is a psychological defense mechanism or what.
Literally not one person is going to vote for John Fetterman because he voted to confirm some dipshit who would have voted against him had he voted no. The idea that voters are somehow tracking particular votes and will remember in November is just... I don't even know where to start with that level of cloud-cuckoo-landism.
If you stake out a consistent position toward the center of the political spectrum and then vote consistently with that position, I think you will reap (modest, but real) rewards for it. If you are just a weathervane who votes against Democratic priorities 25% of the time with no rhyme or reason for it other than "gotta be moderate," I think the political rewards for that are either zero or actively negative. Most Democratic "moderates" are of the latter variety; they couldn't explain their political philosophy if you gave them half a season of Schoolhouse Rock to do it with.
Was it evil and stupid for Joe Manchin to pare back Biden's big spending bill because of inflation concerns, or was Matt right to give him cover? Were activists right on the money when they supported a leftist primary challenger for senator of West Virginia? Voting for "a procedurally tenacious leftist" is not a very good strategy for getting senators in key swing states, and centrist concerns can't be waved away or dismissed offhand -- leftist convictions are wrong all the time!
Probably-- he lost his seat anyway, and the bill contained a lot fewer durable policy changes. I think Manchin's tactical instincts were pretty terrible. He consistently picked weird, off-putting things to moderate on. He only looks smart by comparison when put next to Golden or Kyrsten Sinema.
That said, WV is SO red now that it's not clear to me that any Democrat or independent could win there without the benefit of legacy Dixiecrat status.
I know Matt agrees with me about the importance of moderates not being stupid wimps-- he's posted about it before-- he just doesn't seem to have any idea for how to get there from here. Neither do I, to be honest.
I thought the deal with Manchin is that he thought those durable policy changes were bad and didn't want them to happen, not that it was some kind of political strategy.
Correct; he was a moron who thought that giving money to poor moms would cause them to all start doing drugs or some shit. In so doing, he grievously damaged the Democratic Party's standing with lower-income Americans for zero benefit.
It wasn't a stratagem, but it was absolutely evil and stupid, which was my original point.
Congress seems like a job that sucks right now and having a job that sucks while doing things you think is right but makes many of the people you think should be on your side be mad at you also suck.
Well there's the fairly obvious one that he can now go get a job that pays him zillions of dollars to lobby for corporate causes, a la Sinema. That's nearly always what happens with these Blue Dog types after leaving Congress.
"Fundamentally, though, I think that if you’re looking at a city like San Francisco or New York or Boston and wanting to make it more family-friendly, spending a bunch of money on child care subsidies is not where I would start. The most important thing, by far, is to make it easier to add market rate housing, especially in the places where the land values are highest. After that, it’s improving the management of your existing K-12 schools and maintaining public order on the streets."
Wu is a political child of Elizabeth Warren. So, her shittiness on housing is drearily predictable.
I don't think Wu is quite as disappointing as her mentor. She has to fill potholes, after all. But on housing she's been a bitter disappointment. More or less the Anti-Hochul.
That's the problem. She's been mayor for 5 years and is still running studies, building consensus, hiring consultants, etc rather than doing meaningful things.
Yes, I agree with this description of her approach. There seems to be a clear disagreement on strategy here. Wu prefers a go-slow, bring together a coalition, adjust to do coalition management approach as opposed to a top-down, move fast and break things approach. I have my own preferences here, but I don't know enough about Boston city factions to have a clear sense on which political strategy is correct here. I haven't lived in Boston proper in a long time.
Empirically, Walsh's administration was faster and more effective at granting permits and producing new construction (business and housing) than either Wu's or Menino's. Menino was widely viewed as wanting to control and channel housing his way. Wu seems to have the same approach, just with a different set of interests to appease.
I have heard that incarcerating people with illegal guns is racist. It disproportionately affects certain minorities here in the KC area. We just can’t lock people up with illegal guns because it feeds the school to prison pipeline.
Several years ago on the Weeds he had a guest who had done some research into gun crime in KC, but I can't remember the name. He had examined a "natural experiment" situation of before/after Missouri loosened concealed carry rules in 2007 iirc.
When we find out a policy has disproportionate impact, we can keep doing it, stop doing it, or find a way to make it less racist. No one ever picks the less racist option because it's really hard.
Whenever I hear disproportionate impact I have visions of people claiming the SAT is racist because different races score differently. I also think of Griggs v. Duke Power which I despise and wish to see overturned in my lifetime.
"You probably end up with a significantly larger Ralph Nader vote in 2004 than you had in 2000, plus Republicans nominating John McCain on a moderate platform. I think this means Gore loses his re-election bid badly."
Always interesting to me gaming out these things. Agree with all of that, you likely then still get a bad economy by 2008, meaning a President McCain loses his re-election campaign. But without an Iraq war, more likely that Hillary Clinton is the Dem nominee than Obama, and you end up with a Hillary Presidency from 2009-2016. 2016 would then see Obama run and probably end up as a stronger nominee to go up against Trump that year, than Hillary in reality was.
All in all, fair to say that the old lib theory that the world would be much better if Gore had won in 2000 is probably true, even if he'd likely lost in 2004.
Without an Iraq War, neocons aren't completely discredited, and the 2016 election goes closer to plan: someone like Jeb! or Marco is probably the nominee
How are you getting to that? Thomas would still be on the Court. 2004 was a bonanza election for SCOTUS, so McCain would still get Rehnquist and O'Connor's seats that doesn't change the balance. Then Hillary gets the Stevens, Souter, and RBG seats that doesn't change it either. Obama gets Scalia's seat to finally tip the balance. It's very hard seeing Obama getting reelected amid the pandemic, which means Kennedy can hold on until a Republican wins in 2020. Breyer also might not step down.
So that 5-4 Democratic appointees, which is a major change, but the balance still very close.
Except, as I said, there's a good chance Kennedy holds on for a Republican, and he can probably get one in 2021.
I don't know who McCain precisely nominates, but remember that Dubya originally nominated Harriet Miers, but was then bullied into pulling her and replacing her with the widely acclaimed Alito. So I wouldn't rule out an Alito type from McCain.
Indeed. It's still one that's very contingent to flip back, though. The question would be how many of Kennedy, Thomas, and the other two Republican appointees retire under the Republican president that I see beating Obama. We might get some clarity on Thomas this summer. If all four retire strategically, then it's still on the edge. I would imagine that the Republican that beats Obama is a one termer, and then it comes down to how many Democratic appointees step down in the present.
Here was my attempt at finding a gun policy that would be workable both in actually cutting down gun violence and being politically viable. Note that I don't necessarily endorse this, and would blatantly violate DC v. Heller in any case:
--Existing guns may be possessed as is.
--Same with single shot bolt action hunting rifles.
--All other new guns and ammo must be housed at licensed gun ranges.
The idea here is very slowly breaking the fever of the idea of guns for protecting oneself, while keeping plenty of avenues for recreational gun shooting open, and also recognizing how daunting it is to try to claw back all the existing guns out there. It would take a very long time to make a dent, and since it would satisfy very few in the short term, it's unlikely in any case. But that was my attempt. Now we'll see if Dave Coffin shows up to poke all kinds of holes in this.
That is in no way compatible with the 2nd Amendment. It is therefore not sensible.
The only possibly sensible policy would be to step up enforcement on existing gun laws, which means reliably pursuing, arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning the criminals.
That solves one part of the problem, but the other part of the gun problem in the U.S. (which Matt touches on sort of) is irresponsible behavior by otherwise law abiding gun owners that results in lots of accidental shootings and quite a few guns being stolen and then used in crimes. When my uncle died recently, one of the things his son had to do was go around the house, the garage, and all of his cars and secure about a dozen loaded handguns he had stashed all over the place -- including in places where the grandkids probably had access to them. And he lived in the middle of nowhere. Very low crime. He'd never been robbed or been a victim of a crime. Just thought he needed to have a loaded gun within reach at all times.
I'm not sure what the solution is to preventable gun deaths like kids picking up a loaded, unsecured gun and accidentally shooting themselves or someone else; kids taking their parents' guns and committing crimes; people with dementia accidentally shooting people with the horde of guns they accumulated before they lost their faculties, etc. But that represents a chunk of gun deaths that could be addressed through legislation around liability, maybe, without threatening ownership. I would think gun owners would have some interest in addressing this type of stuff, since it involves law abiding gun owners shooting themselves, each other, or their loved ones in non-crime-related circumstances, but I haven't heard any practical or politically viable suggestions on that front.
<500 accidental gun deaths per year in the US. I don't mean to minimize them, but they seem tough to solve and just not as common as many other sources of accidental deaths.
You can make it compatible with the 2nd Amendment by requiring that new guns be purchased through a licensed “militia” that is responsible for the guns being used responsibly. Failure to do so would result in the militia losing its license and its guns
Horror of horrors, the government, as part of its obligation to assure the existence of well-regulated (yes, the word has a number of interpretations). It’s privatization of gun control with the government stepping in only when the private sector fails.
Like most gun laws, particularly licensing and registration, this would likely function best administratively at the state level but, if out of state guns are a big problem, then it could be federal.
>>There are lots of single-shot designs that aren't bolt action.>>
Are there? I've never used a single-shot that wasn't bolt-action, unless you're talking about like literal muzzle-loaders (or maybe breech-loaded break-action like a shotgun).
At any rate, I think the load-bearing part was "single shot" rather than the action.
Lol sometimes I think his business manager or someone must be pushing him to boost engagement. Matt clearly enjoys writing about stuff like… housing policy, trains, congressional infighting way more.
MY is also a better analyst of housing than he is of Israel.
It’s not even that my politics on Israel are that far off his. We both support a two state for two peoples solution. It’s just that his analysis of Israel Palestine is just not very good
Sometimes I cynically think “terrible Israel-Palestine analysis” is more of a feature than a bug. Vapid analysis might help him signal to other Democratic coalition members that he can sometimes be reasonable and doesn’t just want to troll them all the time.
But then I remember his other foreign policy takes… which more or less boil down to I <3 Obama.
If his takes ended at “I want to cut military aid to Israel” and “I want to the US to be less involved in the Middle East”, then maybe I’d see that. He clearly thinks that Israel is a good topic for moderate candidates to signal left on to help manage the progressives in the coalition.
But some of his takes like this one that “the conflict is intractable because Shas has religious objections to dividing Jerusalem” are so absurd that it’s has hard to even know where to start.
And I always thought that Obama was a good president despite his weak foreign policy (and not only about Israel).
Maybe you can explain something to me. Why do Israelis dislike Obama so much? It’s fairly remarkable how unpopular Obama is (or was) in Israel. I’ve heard several reasons.
1. Disagreed with JCOPA and wanted to maintain maximum pressure on Iran.
2. Netanyahu and others were open Republican Party supporters
3. Prefer semi-stable authoritarian dysfunctional Arab states to more democratic Islamist states enabled by the Arab spring.
4. Racism and an inability to conceive of a black American leader
It’s not only that Israel “disagreed” with the JCPOA, but Israel viewed it as a threat, because you were strengthening, conventionally, a country 10x bigger than Israel, sworn to Israel’s elimination and destruction and who funds terrorist organizations that attack Israel‘a citizens. Whether that was worth it for a 15 year pause on their nuclear program was a question. I have some sympathy to Obama’s position. But for Israelis it’s not an abstract disagreement, but a potential real threat (and that threat indeed played out, as we saw from the sophistication of the IRGC-funded and directed Houthis and Hezbollah in the past few years).
But Obama was trying to bring Iran into the family of nations, without insisting that they stop funding terror, without insisting that Iran stop calling for the death of Israel. In the aftermath, the Iranian regime put up a doomsday clock counting down the seconds till Israel‘s destruction (which is real, look it up).
Obama also was a lot less clear than his predecessor on the issue of Palestinian refugees. Clinton was very clear that the descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 would not be able to settle within the boundaries of Israel, but would in a separate Palestinian state or a third country. These “refugees” are not refugees by any international standards, and are only designated as such because Palestinians are the only people with a separate designated refugee agency that tries to keep the problem alive by never settling a single refugee, having refugee status pass indefinitely from father to children. Obama on the other hand was much more ambiguous on this issue.
Obama insisted on a settlement freeze, which Israel did do in 2010 to 2011. Israelis felt that he was pressuring them, without comparable pressure on Palestinians. And Obama never seemed to give the Israelis credit for doing the politically challenging settlement freeze that they did do.
The Obama administration also abstained rather than vetoing a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity.
The thing that Matt gestured towards that is the under discussed part of the gun control debate is that rules and regulations targeting law abiding gun owners just push them away from your coalition without doing much to stop violence.
Harsher penalties for gun crimes and more stop and frisk type laws seem like the more effective (albeit likely unpopular) approach.
I think a lot of anti-gun types don’t care about law abiding gun owners or think they are closet fascists or a menace who should be given no political space.
I think this is a big reason why the gun control movement keeps failing - everyone can see their goals go far beyond supposed “common sense” reforms and most of their ideas would have a big impact on lawful owners and very little impact on criminals and mass shootings.
What's funny (?) is I'm not sure the median gun-restrictionist voter necessarily feels that way. Unsurprisingly, the goals of the activists far, far overshoot (sorry) their base of nominal political support.
Speaking for myself, I don't really give a shit if you have a semiauto AR-15, even though it has a pistol grip and it's black and it looks scary.
I mean, it's easy to get all philosophical about "what IS the true nature of crime, really?" but to a first approximation, it's not that difficult.
Anything that involves violence, or a credible threat of violence, should be a crime. Domestic violence? Crime. Holding up someone at gunpoint? Crime. Carjacking? Crime. Etc. etc. A step down from that, stealing or intentionally destroying property (e.g., arson) is a crime.
Needless to say (but I guess it has to be said nowadays, sigh) I want criminal suspects of *all* races/ethnic backgrounds to be treated equally.
Did you understand my question? Would you care to answer it? As an aside, I agree "stop and frisk" without probable cause is unconstitutional. Putting criminals in jail is not unconstitutional. Why is it unpopular with Democrats?
If we could trust that police officers and the justice system were genuinely operating with probity and motivated only by a sincere desire to make the streets safe for law-abiding citizens, there would be more support for law enforcement. However, it’s clear that a significant proportion of supporters of a “tough on crime” politics are just looking for a way to keep people of color on their place, and don’t care about crime per se. Put another way, the “crime problem” they’re concerned with is black people in durags and sagging pants just walking around, not murder, rape, and theft, and if we brought down actual crime without doing something about the “thugs” we won’t have solved the problem.
That’s not to say that everyone who cares about crime thinks like this. But because for decades “I’m tough on crime” has been used as a dogwhistle to mean “I’ll put *those people* back in their place”, it’s very hard to for someone sincerely tough on crime to convey that they’re tough on crime for real and not for racism purposes. This poses no real problem for Republicans who genuinely want to do something about crime, but for Democrats, it makes anti crime politics costly to their political standing within the Democratic coalition.
Additionally because lack of trust in the police among communities of color is a real problem hindering effective law enforcement, someone sincere about solving crime as a policy problem will also want more police accountability. But police don’t like being held accountable, and so real police reform is often accompanied by wildcat work-to-rule labor actions by cops, where they slack off on doing their jobs. So the choice for Democrats wanting to address crime is to get tough on crime without police accountability and look racist, or get tough on crime with police accountability and look ineffectual.
And that’s just the problem for Democrats who actually care about crime and want to do something about it. There’s a chunk of the Democratic coalition—minuscule in statewide and national politics, but often having real juice in local politics—that agrees with the racists that putting people of color in their place is the purpose of law enforcement, but thinks that’s bad. A lot of the dysfunction around crime in cities around the country is because these people wield actual power.
Crushing police unions needs to be a bipartisan policy objective. But in our stupid populist horseshoe environment, both sides seem to want to give more labor protections to these groups.
Ok, so you are operating on the Critical Race Theory model. I'm not going to move your needle. Your entire reasoning process is built around cliches and what you think other people think, not evidence. Copious evidence supports that minority communities want policing and jail sentences for criminals--which is logical since the majority of crime victims are themselves minorities. Copious evidence--victim surveys--support that young, black males are over-represented in the criminal population.
Evidence. Not mind reading. Nonetheless, thank you for answering the question.
There are over 100 million gun owners in this country now, and they would simply ignore the non-stolen check. Like they literally wouldn't do it.
Sorry to sound cranky but I get tired of explaining this over & over & over. 'Hey I have a great idea for gun control- we can require insurance/require licensing/require safe storage/require a not-stolen check/require whatever'. Etc. etc. etc. Virtually all of the existing gun owners in the country would simply ignore your law. What are you going to do about that? Send the military door-to-door to search people's homes for illegal guns? This is why it's an intractable problem
>What if gun owners had to take their guns in for a not-stolen check every year?<
Lots of things might work. Almost none of them could get through the double filter of Congress+federal courts. And even those that did would probably cost Democrats dearly. Just ain't worth it.
I'm the furthest thing from a 2nd Amendment zealot imaginable. If it were up to me we'd at minimum nationalize the Massachusetts approach. Bog standard, rich country gun regulations would save a lot of lives! But for various reasons the country can't/isn't ready for that.
Worth noting that Massachusetts, like all of the other blue states I'm aware of, eventually outlawed sales of *new* semi-automatic rifles. They didn't try to outlaw the existing ones that were already in possession. I personally know Massachusetts residents who legally own & possess AR-15s and AK-47s within the state (including a doctor)- they just bought them before the current ban, so they're grandfathered in. I've legally shot both of those rifles at a licensed indoor Massachusetts range run by cops! Food for thought as to how effective some bans are- even the bluest state doesn't dare make all of the old owners felons overnight
1. Getting rid of emission tests/smog checks would be very popular! Modeling a gun policy off an unpopular policy is a poor start.
2. Cars are constantly seen under normal circumstances. So you can't get away with an expired tag, they can check for expired emission test when you renew the tag, etc., and it can all be enforced with fines in line with minor traffic violations. None of this is true of guns. What should the penalty be for skipping the stolen check for 20 years, when the final answer is it wasn't stolen? A number big enough to encourage compliance is too big to match the crime.
And far worse: the possessor of a stolen gun just ... skips the check. It's the worst of both worlds, with paperwork for gun owners that doesn't even inconvenience criminals.
(1) Stronger gun regulations would make Americans safer.
(2) There's virtually no prospect of doing this on a national scale in the foreseeable future, so Democrats shouldn't waste political capital on such a project. Indeed, it's not just a waste of finite political capital in the classic sense (as would be the case with, say, doing healthcare reform, or increasing revenue). It really hurts you with large numbers of voters in states you absolutely have to do better in to save the country from its current, incredibly depressing trajectory.
(3) And in any event we're already seeing a genuinely spectacular drop in gun crime, so...
More and/or different kinds of firearms regulation are definitely needed if we want to bring down gun crime and intentional homicide. Just look at the rest of the rich world. Are you seriously contending Germany and Canada have found secret ways to enforce gun regulations they won't share with us?
We can't have a bog standard rich world system of gun laws because of politics (and yes, our current, ludicrously erroneous 2nd Amendment jurisprudence is downstream of politics).
Incidentally, both of the countries I cite above enjoy widespread firearms ownership and robust hunting cultures: being sensible wrt firearms regulation need not equate to gun grabbing!
Matt writes: "Yet even though D.C. cops seize thousands of illegal guns every year, this has relatively low efficacy because criminals just get new guns."
The solution is to seize the *criminals* in addition to the guns. A guaranteed 5 years in prison if caught with an illegal firearm would go a long way to a better situation than we have today.
Where’d you get 5 from? I’m all for more policing of illegal firearms, but the penalty seems stiff.
That's already the number for DC and Fed law as well as for many states, and it goes up from there.
It ought to be 55 just to make sure they age out of the primary crime years.
If someone has an illegally possessed firearm due to a criminal record then that's exactly the type of criminal that does a disproportionate amount of violent crime.
Yes. While I’m not opposed to Matt’s suggestions here we have laws that the entire criminal justice system seems entirely unwilling to enforce to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.
ATF investigates an incredibly small amount of straw sales, for instance.
Every local newspaper article about a gun homicide has a paragraph with the shooter’s criminal history, and it almost always includes previous convictions (often multiple!) for unlawful possession of a firearm. There are laws on the books we could use to prevent a lot of these deaths, which we appear to have done in the past, but we wanted to unsolve the problem :-/
2028 Democratic nominee should make a big show of "I'm not going to ask for a single new gun law, I'm just going to ask for the money to enforce the ones we already have to stop criminals."
This is one thing that boggles my mind about more liberal/progressive jurisdictions. On one hand, they want to pass more restrictive gun laws, but on the other hand, they don’t reliably prosecute illegal possession. This makes no sense to me.
It's anarcho tyranny.
Repress law abiders but let law breakers do their thing.
Progressives don't believe in consequentialism. They believe in being "good people." Good people don't need to own guns. Good people don't support our unjust criminal justice system and long prison sentences for the disadvantaged.
It works fairly well in Britain even as the polices ability/willingness to enforce the law in general is obviously degrading significantly. Criminals rarely actually fire/shoot anything prohibited in the firearms acts as it immediately upgrades the police response to serious armed response and your prison sentence from what might have been a year or even a suspended sentence to decades.
I grew up on a rather rough council estate and tip offs about guns would lead to extremely serious instant police responses and was used a way to get rid of people who had done something sufficiently bad to the estate.
"and was used a way to get rid of people who had done something sufficiently bad to the estate."
Can you explain more about that? I'm probably not the only American who doesn't even know what a council estate is. This sort of sounds like some sort of community action, but I don't know how big the community might be, whether it had a leadership that would decide to exile the bad person, what kind of things "sufficiently bad" were etc. The whole thing sounds interesting but I'm not informed enough about the UK to imagine it.
Rough equivalent to American "The Projects", subsidised housing that often fills up with less savoury people. I'm not going to pretend it was some honourable community policing system (anyone who has lived in this sort of environment knows that they aren't what certain types romanticise they are), but it always seemed ad hoc. Fairly close to community action, you stay on good terms with your neighbours and they look out for you and petty crime against your property won't happen (e.g. things stolen from your yard or break ins), if someone is causing problems word will spread until someone scary will have a word with them and if that fails it will escalate to things like reporting them for weapons offences with the community just implicitly agreeing to tell the police that they did see things like weapons if asked after the fact. If there was any centralised leadership I was never exposed to it.
My estate wasn't super rough though, on the really rough estates someone causing problems would probably have their teeth kicked in if they didn't stop when warned as they won't want police attention. I've known people from the really rough estates and from how they talked (and services offered) it sounds similarly decentralised.
The British term for public housing. Biggest issue there in the US is the Fourth Amendment. I can't bust down a door because Jerry, someone who frequently lies to my face, told me there was a gun inside.
Edit: to clarify further, even if I were to get a warrant based on Jerry telling me this, there is a section on the affidavit for the search warrant which amounts to "why is Jerry a reliable source?" And given that Jerry is in fact NOT a reliable source, I cannot legally use his statement to get into that house.
Roughly: a public housing project.
And I think it’s a phenomenon where you snitch on someone who has a weapon for being an absolute weapon
Oooh you need to watch the UK version of Shameless, it’s truly a great show. It takes place on a council estate. The US version is a pale substitute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shameless_(British_TV_series)
No it wouldn't, because then we'd end up with the enormous costs of running a criminal justice system that guaranteed 5 years in prison (and the attendant collateral costs, like de facto unemployability) to anyone caught with an illegal firearm. And people (correctly, in this instance) aren't willing to pay those costs.
As in so many other areas, Americans want high state capacity but also want to pay for a government with no state capacity.
Your last sentence is what I feel like screaming after every community or city council meeting - people wanting everything, but then mad that it has to be paid for. I might steal this sentence.
Or, you know, people would carry them less as we already know is the case when these laws are rigorously enforced.
Also worth pointing out that basically no one catches an illegal firearms charge as a first offense that puts them in prison and gives them a record, and that was the case even when we were much more vigorous about pursuing illegal guns.
Do you know how much money we'd save by actually keeping the repeat criminals in prison?
It's cheaper to imprison a repeat offender than to have to keep catching them and putting them through the courts.
Plus, you know, protecting the innocent from criminals is kind of a core competence of a government.
Do you know how much money it would cost to imprison a significant % of the US population?
>It's cheaper to imprison a repeat offender than to have to keep catching them and putting them through the courts
I mean look, I agree with your last sentence, and I'm not an anti-police progressive type. With that being said- just from a mathematical/budgetary perspective, no, this is totally wrong. It's extremely expensive to house & feed adults 24/7/365, build the physical prisons, maintain the prisons, pay the guards who are probably unionized, etc. etc. If the US locked up say 1-3% of the population, I've seen estimates of $500 billion-a trillion annually. It's very very very expensive
Why is incarceration very expensive?
Policy choices. We could make it cheaper. We used to make it cheaper.
Food isn't expensive, actually. Neither are large buildings with prison cells. Prison guards cost what they cost, but they're mid-range blue collar jobs.
You're making a basic analytic error of comparing the easily seen and calculable -- the cost of prisons -- against what is very hard to calculate -- the cost of insufficiently impeded violent criminality. The latter is at least an order of magnitude larger than the former, but in a million ways large and small.
Do you know how much society loses from the effects of violent crime and dealing with the potential for violent crime? We have entire plots of otherwise extremely valuable urban real estate that are uninhabitable by civilized citizens. We go through immense rigmaroles to avoid being victimized. The victims, of course, matter too.
The larger/worse your violent criminal population is the MORE IMPORTANT it is to lock them the fuck up so they can't affect civilized society.
I just googled "what is the cost of the effects of crime in the us" and the Google AI says "studies say" between $2.6 and $5 trillion. (Of course, these numbers could vary wildly based on how you choose to value e.g. the price of a human life, or the psychic cost of fear.)
So by your own numbers we can't not afford to expand our prisons.
I don't, but you seem to, so you should share that important factual information with the group, and compare and contrast it with the costs of imprisonment.
This is a wonderfully ignorant take since you have to pretend to be unaware of the costs of police dealing with repeat violent offenders, the courts dealing with repeat violent offenders, and the victims of repeat violent offenders vs. simply the cost of incarceration.
This is obvious on its face but you can foolishly try to pretend I need to have a study demonstrating the efficacy of incapacitation. This type of educated illogic over common sense is responsible for a lot of failed social policy.
Hm. I made the mistake of assuming that you were here to make a factual argument, rather than just blathering and blustering pointlessly about your fact-free personal opinions. You have successfully persuaded me otherwise. Good work!
You are pretty obviously beyond factual persuasion if you need a double-blind study on the efficacy of parachutes there bud.
The cult of scholarship to avoid accepting basic truth is just motivated reasoning with extra steps.
I actually did make a factual argument is the thing your warped understanding of how to evaluate basic reality compels you to ignore. It’s not my opinion that police, courts, and crime impacts are more expensive than prisons. If it were, why even have prisons. Would be cheaper and easier to just let them run free.
We have done stuff like that for years. We don't catch enough felons in possession for that to work. Which gets back to putting tracking devices in guns and doing registration, which the paranoids in the gun movement are convinced would lead to confiscation.
Doesn't it work quite well? My impression is that the empirical literature says that locking up people with illegal handguns significantly reduces shootings and explains a decent share of declines in shootings
It reduces it from worse to bad.
So it works well.
In historical terms we’re near a nadir in gun crime right now and seem to be headed lower.
So not really, no.
We still have tons more gun deaths than peer countries.
Our peer countries are Latin America, not Europe. Period, full stop.
I'm a non-paranoid gun owner but I think this is part of where it would be helpful to clearly lay out what your regulatory structure and endgame is. Right now there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be either (i) a first step to confiscation, given that's what the most passionate advocates of more restrictions want, or (ii) another way to bother law abiding owners while remaining reluctant to do anything about people who actually use their (often ill gotten) weapons to commit crimes, homicides or otherwise.
Regarding tracking devices in firearms I think it is probably pretty underrated for those outside of the know just how easy it is to make a perfectly functional firearm with readily available tools. Increasingly this is what you see, now referred to in the media for purposes of full on moral panic, as 'ghost guns.' The technology to do this of course exists in other places too but happens less because, while a legal firearm market probably matters on the margins, murder and crime are complex socio-cultural phenomena that tend to defy technocratic solutions.
Are people making a lot of ghost guns in places where guns are prohibited? It doesn't seem like it.
You can't separate this issue from the fact that people who really like guns are both (1) into dominance politics and (2) very paranoid. So they say a lot of things about how whatever we are going to do is going to lead to all these slippery slopes, and, sure, it's possible (you can't dismiss the concerns entirely), there's also plenty of countries in this world with different gun regulation regimes that seem to be reasonably stable equilibria.
I think that’s an untrue and pejorative characterization. The claim that people who like guns are into dominance and are paranoid is not one to accept at face value and is contrary to my experience.
The leaders of gun orgs and 2nd amendment activists claimed Obama was going to confiscate everyone's guns before they left office. That kept on not happening. If there wasn't a baseline level of being a paranoid person in the movement, Trump would never have become the Republican nominee.
I bet most people with experience talking to these folks agree with me and not you.
I used to be one of those folks and know a lot of them still.
There are definitely a non trivial number of loud types that you describe, but there are also a large number who are not, who are basically normies with a hobby, a hobby many people don’t talk much about.
Exactly what do you say these peoples that like Guns are paranoid of?
If you think they are paranoid about their guns being taken, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be concerned about.
Given, there's large numbers of progressives that would love to go to a system where those guns just aren't there.
Gun rights types are often paranoids and I think this fact is pretty obvious to the rest of us.
What's far more obvious paranoia is all the people overly concerned about mass and school shootings, given how rare they are.
In contrast, efforts to restrict gun rights happen all the time.
Is it a reasonable thing to be concerned about?
If in 2028, President AOC sweeps into office leading a Democratic wave with a Super majority in the Senate and House, "confiscation" of firearms, would gun confiscation happen?
I think it's an impossibility even in that impossible scenario.
Edit: I agree that there are many progressives out there who would like to ban guns in the US. I'm probably one of them! But I don't think anything remotely close to mass confiscation is ever happening in this country.
Why do you think confiscation is impossible in your scenario?
"Are people making a lot of ghost guns in places where guns are prohibited? It doesn't seem like it."
3D-printed Glock frames are showing up on crime guns seized by the NYPD quite a bit now.
My understanding is that the chemistry to make (smokeless) powder and (even more so) primers is still hard enough that, in countries where you can't buy pre-made powder/primers or ammunition without a gun license, then there's little point in ghost guns.
I believe that you can buy powder and primers without even a background check in the US, so anyone with the technical competence to make a ghost gun can make ammunition ("reloading").
You can buy black powder without a FAC (FireArms Certificate) in the UK, but not smokeless.
Plus there's an estimated couple billion rounds of ammo laying around the US. If you make a ghost gun in say 9mm, easy enough to just some 9mm somewhere. Ammo purchases here don't require IDs or background checks, etc.
Yeah but guns are legal here
Wasn't sure how literal you were being.
The civil libertarian case against tracking is a lot harder to swallow in an age where we all willingly buy smartphones. Maybe that's the compromise--introduce it as a feature and have smith and wesson track the data instead of the government and nobody will care.
I think a tracking requirement would be contrary to the 4th amendment and technically very challenging, but the question was about having dictatorial authority.
Well I'm just saying it would be totally extra-regulatory. The big arms manufacturers would just start doing it and sell it as a "find my gun" feature and everyone would willingly buy into it. On the one hand, I'm skeptical that gun people would just lie down and allow giant corporations to track them, but in 2002 that's what I would have said about smartphones.
I mean, if you pretend that the question is totally separate from a much larger debate covering all kinds of regulatory, constitutional, and cultural issues, sure, easy peasy. :)
Consider a case where the government orders anyone attending a protest to carry a tracking device. Is "we all willingly buy smartphones" a good justification?
Everyone at a protest does carry a tracking device! It's how we caught a whole bunch of the Jan. 6 rioters. You don't need a regulation requiring it, people obviously don't care.
But what if the government ordered everyone attending a protest to carry a tracking device?
The venn diagram of people with the engineering wherewithal to manufacture their own gun and the willingness to commit the senseless violence associated with guns right now seems to be that one Japanese guy who shot Abe.
What you're missing is that once a gun is manufactured, it's now 'out there' in the world. One guy can manufacture & sell it, another can use it. Guns have a functional lifespan of decades. This tracks the way illegal guns seem to work now- one person steals it, or buys it in a straw purchase, and then someone else actually uses it in a crime. I agree the average street criminal isn't going to personally 3D print a weapon themselves, but division of labor etc. etc.
In the same way that someone will build a trap into a car, rewire two buttons on the console to run the trap, and then give it to a meth-head to drive from Tampa to Minneapolis, someone can learn basic gunsmithing and 3D printing, then sell the gun to the same meth-head.
Eh check out giggle switches. Any moron with a 3d printer can make them
How many morons own 3d printers?
Only a moron would want a full auto pistol.
Gangs already employ chemists to make all types of illegal drugs
Why wouldn't gangs employ engineers and tradesmen to make illegal guns
because the profit opportunity from selling drugs is a lot higher than from having guns
Isn't that because of supply and demand? There is legal supply of guns the way there isn't for those drugs. If you removed the legal supply of guns, I suspect that profit opportunity would go up dramatically.
I mean, there’s probably some engineering geek out there who really wants his wife’s insurance money… but probably no more than 3-4 more globally.
>Right now there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be either (i) a first step to confiscation, given that's what the most passionate advocates of more restrictions want<
I dunno. Seems to me it's often very hard to get things enacted in America. By constitutional design. "What the most passionate advocates" want more often isn't what becomes policy. No, what becomes policy is usually "compromise."
That said, Democrats shouldn't spend an ounce of political capital on gun control as things currently stand (if circumstances change, the political calculus could change).
I think most gun owners believe not unreasonably that if there was a Democratic majority on SCOTUS, it would suddenly become much more likely that states could regulate firearms up to and including confiscation.
It's amazing how this level of paranoia that someone is going to come take all of their guns is based on pretty much no actual historical precedent in this country. Because of the electoral map, this is one of the forms of paranoia that people can display without looking like a nutcase on the street.
A bit of paranoia seems justified when the Democrats field candidates who say things like, “We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”
The paranoia is what led them to acquire the AR-15 or AK-47 in the first place, Ken.
A lot of the paranoids also believe the UN is going to invade Kansas with black helicopters. Even when Democrats have been quiet on this issue, the paranoia is there. The NRA has changed a lot in the past 70 years to be an organization that has relied on stoking paranoia to cultivate donations. Gun culture has its own agency.
I mean, we've lived through an era where a book by a major conservative activist called for putting all American Muslims in internment camps, but anyone who thought Bush was actually going to do that was a crank.
Agreed, there are huge barriers to it and I understand that the question was premised on those barriers not existing. But we can look at blue states that have lots of performative gun laws combined with reticence about enforcing them against certain people. DC that MY references is like that.
And don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that they'd absolutely throw the book at someone like me for a hyper technical violation. But then I'm not the type of person who would ever commit one, certainly not intentionally.
I agree on political capital.
It doesn't get nearly the attention of sanctuary states and cities for the poorly documented, but there are plenty of 2A sanctuary states and counties.
https://www.gunowners.org/state-sapas/
And its not just Red states! Upstate NY sheriffs basically said the the NY Large Capacity Magazine ban was a dead letter and wouldn't be enforced by local LEOs.
As an advocate of adopting bog-standard, rich country firearms regulations, I'm actually not morose about the possibility of bringing such laws to the US in the fullness of time. I'm old enough to remember when gay marriage and legal, recreational weed seemed like the stuff of fantasy novels. So you never know!
But certainly *at present* there's no plausible political-judicial path to doing so, and moreover making the inevitably quixotic attempt to effect such changes in America is highly likely to cause political damage to the party associated with such an effort. So no sense going there.
(But one day the political-judicial outlook will be different: the logic for adopting common sense rules is simply too compelling. We're just not there in 2026, nor likely for quite a good long while yet.)
"another way to bother law abiding owners while remaining reluctant to do anything about people who actually use their (often ill gotten) weapons to commit crimes, homicides or otherwise."
It seems odd to concede the existence of the political willpower to put trackers in every new gun that's sold while simultaneously claiming a lack of willpower to actually go after serious criminals who use the guns to commit serious crimes, including homicide. I'm fairly confused by the argument TBH. You think that if we could track the gun that was used to murder someone we would be reluctant to follow through on investigating that crime? The change you're conceding is a pretty enormous shift in the way guns would be operating in America, but you then seem to hold steady every other aspect of culture and society around guns to say why you don't think it would be effective in any way.
Given the current landscape of US politics I don't think this is all that odd. The current political party advocating for ever more restrictive gun laws currently also strongly advocates for basically never putting anyone in jail for more than 30 minutes until they finally tip over into murder, and even then there is an army of progressive lawyers trying to "exonerate" them.
But the Second Amendment makes the fears of outright seizure moot.
Does it? Many Democrats claim the 2A doesn't actually protect an individual right to possess firearms. A Democrat-dominated SCOTUS could take up a 2A case, adopt the dissent's position in DC v. Heller, and read the 2A into irrelevance.
Echoing what the other commenter said. 2 SCOTUS seats change hands and gun laws in the US could completely, utterly change
It doesn't help that there are many in the gun control movement who are openly pro-confiscation.
Yes, likewise the whole system of licensing and tracking is super porous and often times not even done with computers. Just have one big database where you could track where guns used in crimes are coming from would be an enormous step forward, but a lot of the gun rights people basically see that as the same as living in Nazi Germany.
I see it as laziness and lack of will. Congress could make law enforcement go after gun trafficking in a big way if it wanted to. So could the states.
Yes, Congress could totally change the law to make it easier to address gun crime and funding ATF a lot more but they don't do that in no small part because the gun rights lobby and movement is super opposed to those things.
Yes, they don't do it because it's insufficiently popular.
It's not paranoia since plenty of people on the Left 100% would love to confiscate all guns and aren't shy about saying it.
Plus there are a number of countries who have done just that.
We should catch more felons and incarcerate violent criminals for longer.
My big idea is bullet microstamping.
The cheapest, ricketiest old photolithography machines out there could EASILY print microscopic repeating QR codes that would be resistant to the damage caused by being fired. A fun fact about QR codes is that they can be reconstructed with barely 25% of the pattern surviving; repeat this by thousands of them barely a micron wide (child’s play for the lithography machine), and you should have PLENTY of the pattern surviving to be read.
From there, you can trace the ammunition to its point of purchase. It’s not perfect, but it’s dramatically better than most of the forensic ballistics tech we currently have.
Obligatory Chris Rock link: https://youtu.be/VZrFVtmRXrw?si=evKMD0xYzbSk8Qg9
I’ve wondered why broken QR codes pretty much always work
This is making me think of the scene in "The Dark Knight" where Batman reconstructs a bullet that somehow leads him to a specific individual shooter (my recollection is that the film is rather vague on how that latter part worked) . . . .
Pretty sure it recreates the bullet fragments to reveal a fingerprint, which is pretty specific to an individual.
They do this on NCIS sometimes too, it’s silly. They’ve also hacked into people’s smart TVs to listen to them without warrants (I assume this is actually possible but that the cops don’t/can’t do it)
NCIS also has images that are "enhanced" to identify suspects from a pixel. 20 years later, AI can generate human faces to insert into a grainy, upscaled image, but it's impossible to reliably generate the *correct* face if you have no idea who it's supposed to be. That's not a technological limitation, the information you need doesn't exist.
Truth is often stranger than fiction, because it's not constrained by the writers' imagination. But fiction is sometimes not constrained by logical possibility.
It's got to be possible, same with your phone. Probably a good idea to disable/block the microphone if you’re not using the feature.
I am not sure how it works, but where I live it's not really gun "seizures" taken from a crime scene, but a gun amnesty program where the police work with a local church to collect guns. The people bringing them in aren't necessarily the criminals, but their relatives or those who know where community guns are stored.
It's a myth that we don't already do that. When Matt talks about the seizing of thousands of guns, that's not thousands of criminals each possessing one gun, that's scooping up dozens of guns from one or two criminals because the DC police do concentrate on finding and eliminating guns qua guns.
There already is a minimum mandatory five year enhancement for possession during a crime or illegal possession in general, under both DC and Federal law. There are similar mandatory minimums in most states.
Prosecutors love using these laws because they are the easiest thing in the world to prove.
The problem isn't that we're not punishing people enough for these crimes, it's that the licit to illicit gun market is so seamless that there is an unending source of guns for criminals. Supply effectively exceeds demand.
If only the outlaws have guns, it would be much easier to identify them.
Yeah, after they victimize defenseless law-abiding citizens.
Next up, banning knives.
A major issue preventing locking people up is DC law. Often what happens is police will find a gun in a car, in a house, etc. but not on someone’s person. Under DC law it is extremely difficult to convict such a person of illegal possession. So they walk.
Based on a few nuggets of information I've encountered on Substack, coupled with my own experiences, the issue may be less about DC law regarding possession, and more about the legal system in DC, coupled with a disconnect between the police and the prosecutor's office, which leaves prosecutors dismissing winnable cases because they don't understand why those cases are winnable.
Someone on Substack who mentioned they spent some time working for the DC legal system, with several months in the prosecutor's office, stated that sometime in 2016, the system changed. Previously, officers who made arrests the night before would stay on past their scheduled off time, or come in a few hours after clocking out, in order to go over the case with a prosecutor. This system was despised by the officers, because it sucked-they could easily be stuck there until the afternoon. The part of me that started work last night at 8 wonders why the AUSO couldn't assign a couple attorney's each day to come in early and handle things, but I'm also aware of why they didn't. The change meant the prosecutors had to rely on the reports, without officer input, in deciding whether or not to press whatever charges they were arrested for.
https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/p/the-us-attorneys-office-declined/comments
The gradual decline in prosecutions following that decision tells me these interactions created ties between the AUSO and the MPD. The prosecutors learned to speak cop; the cops learned to write in lawyer. The prosecutors got a feel for which officers testified well, and the officers knew who to go to for legal questions. Without these interactions, and as new blood entered both departments, those ties fell apart. And so the prosecutors began dropping cases they didn't understand; the cops stopped adding the sorts of lines to their reports the lawyers could underline; and the system started falling apart.
1 year or less mighbe enough if the probability of actually being caught were high enough.
An important point on gas taxes is simply that they should be a percentage, like any other sales tax. Not cents per gallon. The tax gets eaten up by inflation.
That would make more sense if the gas tax went into the general tax pool to be used in any way lawmakers decide, how it usually works in Europe. But in America we use gas taxes to fund transportation maintenance, operations, and capital projects, and it's important that it remain a stable source of revenue. If it were a percentage, it would fluctuate wildly as the global price of oil fluctuates. It's not like a general sales tax, where it would be pretty stable since most prices of goods are pretty stable, and you're averaging across so many goods. It's taxing a commodity that constantly rises and falls in price with large swings. So the flat, nominal amount does make sense given the tax's usual purpose. However, to address your concern about inflation, the gas tax could simply be indexed to inflation so the tax amount slowly increases over time.
I've long wondered if it should be an inflation-adjusted stabilizer. You pick a target price, and as the world market price fluctuates, the at-the-pump tax automatically moves in the opposite direction to counteract that. Building in an inflation adjustment would have been very hard back in the day when oil prices drove so much of the economy, but would be easier today. The time to do it is of course when prices at the pump are very high: you roll it out as a temporary *reduction* in taxes until world prices become sane.
Yeah. A lot of states have additional taxes when you register an electric car for this purpose. It seemed like shitty Republican nonsense until I realized that they still put wear and tear on the roads. They do this in Mississippi but also in Washington state…
We should raise it (creating good incentives around smaller/electric vehicles and less driving) and then keep the proceeds out of the hands of state DOTs, who will build additional lane-miles until they've covered the entire country and start eyeing the moon.
“The strategy of “hope Trump fucks up the economy badly enough that we can get away with blowing off public opinion on cultural issues” looks like it just might work, but I still don’t think it’s a good strategy. I do, however, think it’s a strategy that the Democratic faithful mostly wants” so I explained this to some msnbc boomers recently as I also have a slightly unhinged hope that trump really fucks up iran and the economy so we can win again. BUT what I also explained was that what we are hoping for is the economic suffering and unemployment of our fellow Americans and mostly the already poor and lower wage. Unemployment is bad and we should all recognize that what we are hoping for is a recession.
It is also not a good strategy for staying in power.
For me it's not just the crazy social issues anymore, it's also the kitchen table economic issues. I don't think I can vote for a party that's response to high housing costs is rent control. The insanity is too deep.
Unfortunately the populist slop coming from both parties where there is no intellectual rigor will lead to bad policies imo.
But you even see with Mamdani I think that the realities of governing make it tough to provide simple answers to complex problems. What sounds fun to the masses, isn't really possible. That's why having outsiders provide hot takes or thinking they can just do things better if they try harder or speak louder is super ignorant and really bad long term for politics.
We had a similar issue here with Seattle’s new mayor. She seems genuinely surprised to find out that nonwhite residents of neighborhoods with shootings wanted more cops and cameras. She also wanted to add large amounts of shelter and housing for the homeless but has been struggling because it is in fact a difficult problem. She also seems surprised that most people in a drug encampment turned down offers of housing. It seemed simple from her progressive bubble but the problem turned out to be more difficult
May she get up to speed quick. I was pleasantly surprised to see few signs of homelessness when driving up to Swedish today for an errand. But I have seen more in West Seattle since she became mayor, which is absolutely unacceptable.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say the response of the Democratic Party to high housing costs is rent control. There are many candidates who favor that, yes.
This sure seems to be the popular response in dem controlled states. Is this not on the ballot statewide in Mass? Is Mamdani not a proponent? It's not the only answer, but it seems common enough.
Why not just vote for candidates who don’t support rent control? Because if you go with “this is on the ballot in one state” as the standard for what the whole party supports, you’re going to be pretty shaken by what can be laid at the feat of the Republican Party.
I just want to say that Matt’s examples in this piece really worry me. Voting against ICE and things like Laken Riley aren’t about “culture”, they’re good strategic decisions to make. Whether Trump can succeed or not, we’ve seen clear indications that the purpose of ICE is to assemble a loyal paramilitary force that answers to the President. I am optimistic that Trump won’t pull this off, but the intention is there. Democratic politicians *should* be voting against that in lockstep, and their voters *should* be punishing them for voting for these things. To the extent we don’t have to worry about ICE being a Presidential army, it’ll be because Trump is incompetent and because the public saw them for the unpopular move that Democrats should have recognized them for — but popular or not Dems should assume these moves will work and that they’re aimed at disenfranchising them. Matt’s casual misdiagnosis maddens me because this isn’t “culture”, it’s basic democratic hygiene that Matt is relabeling as culture.
I hate Matt’s opinions on this because he’s been consistently wrong about the danger of Trump, about how far Trump would go, and about the need to confront Trump on these abuses. To the extent we survive this it’ll be because Trump was incompetent and we were able to retain our free and fair electoral system, not because the threats weren’t real. The cost of Matt’s myopia here is that his inability to perceive and counter these serious threats also reduces the credibility of his more moderate policy proposals. Pretending this is “culture” is not the right way forwards.
Without touching on the specifics of your comment, I think it comes down to: what do you think will restrain Trump more, individual votes like those mentioned (ICE, Laken Riley) OR flipping the Senate and House at midterms?
Ideally those aren’t in conflict. But if we presume they are (and the reps making those calls certainly seem to think so), I personally would like to see Trump handicapped for the next two years by a Democratic House and Senate even at the expense of some individual votes that I don’t like.
But of course, many Dems voted for the AUMF in 2002 thinking that it would help them come back to power. Opposing it turned out to be the better decision.
It was certainly a better decision for the personal careers of several Democrats, most notably Obama. Not sure if it would have been a better decision for the Democratic party brand as a whole to have been in lockstep opposition
What faith do you have that these are actually good decisions in flipping congress in the mid terms as opposed to worthless grandstanding?
I would phrase it differently: what faith do you have that some worthless vote to fund ICE in February or March will have any impact on the midterms in November? Fox News will spend the next six months demonizing all Democrats for voting against ICE/DHS funding, and it will either work on the electorate or not. (I strongly suspect that it won’t be very effective, even in relatively conservative-leaning districts, particularly by November.) The number of people who say “oh that guy made a vote, he’s totally different from the rest of the Dems” is likely very small. In general: folks who think that This One Vote will matter to the disengaged masses are usually wrong.
But a Democratic Party that can’t guarantee unity on issues of *existential importance to the survival of the party*? That matters very much. Compromise on that, you’re going to suffer a lot of anger from the base, *and the base will be right*. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you won’t be able to elect those moderate politicians because the electoral system itself will be compromised.
ETA: we’ve been very lucky in Trump that he’s incompetent, and he’s still made enormous progress in executing the building blocks of a Hungary-style one-party state. All it will require is a competent future leader to complete the job. This isn’t theoretical, and no, doing nothing whatsoever and allowing your party to support it is *not* the winning move.
Isn't Hungary's "one party state" likely to end this year? It's a bit hyperbolic, what you're sdaying
I spent my whole life with the assumption that’s we’d never have masked police or a corrupt DoJ arresting political enemies or concentration camps or Presidential appointees caught on video taking bags of cash and laughing at the FBI. If you’d told me this was coming a decade ago I’d have laughed and said it sounds like the plot of a bad movie. I don’t think anything here is hyperbolic.
More likely than it's been in ages, but even if Magyar pulls it off he's still got the same problem as Donald Tusk, plus all the businesses and media that Orban gave to his friends will be hovering around. It wouldn't be surprising to see Orban back after an interregnum.
A couple thoughts:
1. You don’t actually have to believe that a worthless vote to fund ICE will be remembered at midterms for it to make sense. You could also believe that a vote to defund ICE would be remembered by voters in your district in a negative way. So it’s not that it’s necessarily benefiting them positively but avoiding the negative backlash a different vote could have caused.
2. I think your theory of the disengaged masses is wrong. They almost all vote precisely because of “that one issue” - they aren’t broadly informed about everything that’s going on but they have one thing that gets a bee in their bonnet and drives them to go vote this year when they usually don’t or to switch sides. Now what that “issue” is varies massively across swing voters (and mostly it’s the economy, stupid) but I defer to representatives of their own districts (particularly those cited who have typically been able to outperform, presumably because of a particular ability to understand their electorate) to know what is likely to be important for their constituents more so than I do a random internet commenter who probably lives across the country from them and is highly motivated for them to vote a certain way and therefore argue backwards into why it would have been strategic to do so.
My claim is not that “they don’t care about this one issue.” My claim is that there likely isn’t an enormous intersection in the Venn diagram of people for whom (1) this issue is hugely motivating to their vote six months out, (2) who will vote for a member of the party which is overwhelmingly against that issue (at a party level), but (3) is informed enough to know that *their rep* supports that issue, even though s/he belongs to said party.
I’m sure those informed voters do exist. I’m just wondering if they’re so numerous that it’s worth sacrificing the party’s entire ability to credibly confront serious threats. And more critically, given how many errors the party has made just to get us back here to Trump being in charge, can the Democratic Party credibly command support from fundraisers and its base if they continuously demonstrate *zero* ability to execute and compel party discipline?
I wouldn’t say I have 100% faith by any means. It might be closer to 45%. But I am fully willing to take some calculated risks in service of the goal of winning at midterms. I think to oppose those you have to be pretty confident it won’t help you in order to prioritize individual votes over the much larger and more significant goal - and I don’t have a high enough degree of confidence that they won’t work to justify that.
So I would flip your question back to you: how much faith do you have that these types of calls won’t help and are you willing to risk the midterms on it?
At this point I think the House is going to go to the Dems. I think the margin is going to be large enough that these votes don’t matter.
On the flip side, money is really going to matter. Not just for the house, but especially for the Senate. Winning a Senate seat in Texas or Maine or (long shot) Florida is going to require enormous Democratic donor enthusiasm. People have to be willing to crawl over broken glass (or at least make many painfully large donations) and to do that they need to feel confident that a winning Democratic coalition will actually vote for their priorities. This is essentially about signaling credibility.
The Democratic Party has done a genuinely terrible job of signaling credibility. People fought like goblins to get Dems into office in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and they were given ineptitude and inaction in return. The party is incredibly unpopular. More dangerous is that wealthy and powerful donors have lost faith: there’s a reason that 2017 Bezos supported the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post and 2026 Bezos is dismantling it and turning its opinion page conservative. People aren’t going to take the personal risk of lining their money up with a Democratic Party that has no long-term ability to deal with threats beyond just winning the next election. There’s very little time left and we’re going to have to demonstrate some ability to execute once in office. These votes demonstrate that we still can’t demand party discipline even on priorities. So voters and donors are asking: what’s the point of helping that party win?
This!
Suozzi was made to apologize for supporting ICE funding not because the Democrats are dominated by “open borders” fringe wingnuts, but because ICE under Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad organization that routinely violates people’s rights, up to and including shooting two American citizens dead in the street.
It's amazing how low the polling on ICE is. If anything, deciding to fund ICE at this moment doesn't seem a way to make swing voters like you better.
Matt is much too smart to be confused about this, so (unless something has happened to his brain) I tend to think he’s being disingenuous when he treats Democratic concerns about this as though it’s generic culture war stuff.
If you’re not concerned about ICE or creeping authoritarianism, just say so! Don’t try to downplay these issues by misdiagnosing them as weird lib-voter bugaboos, like a preference for organic milk.
The irony is that if Trump were less stupid and less obsessed with making libs cry, he could have turned ICE into an organization that was effective at rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants *without* setting off the median voter’s “gaaahhh I don’t want this!!” response.
I do think there’s a conflict between “be an effective immigration agency” and “be a masked police force designed to intimidate voters and your political enemies.” Trump and his cronies are clearly willing to sacrifice the former to achieve the latter, which we should take seriously — and is why we shouldn’t be treating this like a casual culture-war issue to win points for our factional Democratic interests.
I also agree with you that the unpopular behavior of ICE is currently self-limiting, but that isn’t guaranteed. A terrorist attack or a great economy could be enough to bring him back from underwater. Moreover the unpopular nature of ICE should make it *easier* for D candidates to vote against funding it. If we can’t maintain party discipline against an unpopular President’s least-popular policy initiative, we’re dead. And Democratic voters across the country are right to demand better execution from the party, particularly after the fiasco that was the Biden presidency. Who cares if you win if you’re just paving the road for Trump v3 to successfully weaponize ICE?
I guess my (hopefully balanced) take on this is:
1. In the specific case of the Riley bill, it doesn't seem like having voted for it will help any Dem very much in a general election, nor will having voted against it hurt very much.
2. Was that foreseeable at the time of the vote? I kind of think maybe it was.
3. Broadly speaking, I tend to doubt votes on individual bills matter most of the time. What does matter are the persona and values you project. If you come across as a bleeding heart, and you're trying to win in Ohio or Iowa, then votes aren't going to save you. If you come across as a person who disdains hippie and woke stuff, then you can vote no on right-wing bills and get away with it. But even if you don't need to vote a certain way to project a normie-friendly persona and values, you do still have to do *something* to *affirmatively* project that persona and those values. You can't just rely on having a good bio and "looking Middle American" and avoiding gaffes. You have to be out in the media and showing people that street crime makes you angry (or whatever).
4. However, there are occasionally situations where a vote *can* matter politically, and where Dem congressmembers need to recognize that the Republicans have them cornered on public opinion and to avoid direct conflict. And recognizing when these situations have arisen can be a hard call.
5. In light of that, I don't think Dems who voted yes on the Riley bill should be punished for it, *even if* it was the wrong call, and especially if they're running in swing states and swing districts. (Now if one wants to punish someone like Fetterman, that's different, because there's clearly a lot more going on there. But if the person is generally a Dem in good standing, then people need to give them space.)
I tend to agree with this in regards to ICE, my anecdote data in talking to libertarian republicans in Oklahoma, a group that are genuine swing voters is that the ICE response is a big personal freedom and fed government overreach. I think there is something here that these are not cultural issues, these are policy issues.
Yes, and this clarified a bit of my disagreement with Matt and why I am less pessimisstic than he is. I think he understates the degree to which Dem voters are responding this way specifically because of antipathy to Trump, rather than ideological positioning.
> I hate Matt’s opinions on this because he’s been consistently wrong about the danger of Trump, about how far Trump would go, and about the need to confront Trump on these abuses.
Sorry but unless you're new to Matt's writing this is just an incredible lack of reading comprehension.
God the lack of quality in this comment amazes me. If you’re going to take the time and bandwidth to reply with a criticism, please also take the time to spell out what your detailed criticism is.
Here we go in Matt's words:
> People find this to be very strange, but I sincerely believe that Donald Trump is extremely bad and that the most important thing in American politics is to defeat him and his movement which means the opposition party should try to take more popular stands.
And back to your own:
> The cost of Matt’s myopia here is that his inability to perceive and counter these serious threats also reduces the credibility of his more moderate policy proposals. Pretending this is “culture” is not the right way forwards.
This just screams "person with poor reading comprehension to me".
Looking at Matt's examples in the article:
* The Laken Riley act was going to pass no matter what. This was during the so called vibe shift when everybody was mad about illegal immigration and I understand why many frontline members voted for it.
* Tom Suozzi: Nobody outside their district should know who this person is. After some brief searching "Cook rates NY-3 as Lean Democratic rather than safely Democratic, and explicitly notes the race could get more competitive depending on whether Republicans put real resources into it." despite the seat being pretty Blue leaning. Either way, him changing his vote wouldn't have changed out outcome, though all the frontline democrats deciding to die on this hill would've changed it.
If you actually zoom out though (I know this is hard), the Democrats keep losing seats because of an unwillingness to put up a candidates who are a match for public opinion in many seats, and unless this changes we are going to be left in a spot where we are even more powerless.
Opposing Trump means trying to get power.
Thank you for posting a comment with actual content. Don’t you feel better about this than your original content-free criticism?
I've written several comments above that expand on my point, and I think if you read them you'll find that my point was fairly clear. Yes, I accept Matt's thesis that the Dems should moderate on some positions (or allow more ideological diversity) as a means be more electorally viable. No, I do not think that this applies to *all* positions. I believe that you can devise a principled test to think about which positions should be flexible and which ones shouldn't. I don't think Matt is doing that very effectively: he's just electoral-maxxing without thinking deeply about the implications of these compromises.
I think the older version of Matt (I've been reading him since the early 2000s) would have been articulate enough to devise a test. He would separate positions on which the Democratic party should allow ideological diversity, from other positions that are genuinely essential to Democratic party goals. I would say that "being willing to implement essential reforms, such as dismantling the unaccountable police force called ICE" would fall into the second category. Any Dem candidate (particularly one in a *blue-leaning district*!!!) that isn't on-board with opposing ICE and Laken Riley, simply isn't going to be able to take those strong stances. This will seriously weaken any post-election Democratic coalition, and the base is right to punish this.
Now obviously we could debate what positions are "essential" to the Democratic party's post-election agenda. I'd be open to hearing Matt opine on that. His stances so far have been wishy-washy on this issue. On the *policy* matter, he's clearly stated that getting rid of ICE is the right strategy. He just seems unwilling to make any sort of political compromise to ensure that this actually happens.
And unfortunately, for these essential reforms to happen, Dem voters need confidence that a candidate like Suozzi will be willing to make courageous votes *after we win the election*. Can I draw such confidence from his past votes, symbolic or not? No, I cannot. And the voters clearly cannot. Even worse, Suozzi holding those positions and being allowed to vote them sends a strong signal that the party is unable to enforce discipline on its members, which also tells potential donors and voters that a post-election Democratic party will be as ineffective as the pre-Trump Democratic party. This is a deadly liability, and the Democrats cannot afford to be viewed this way.
TLDR: contra Matt, thermostatic public opinion and the unpopularity of Trump are already doing most of the work that Matt says we needed to compromise for. This doesn't mean that compromises are unnecessary, but they can't make the Democratic party unable to implement critical reforms. We need serious policy thinkers, especially influential pundits who can think about those policies and convince political Democrats to pre-commit to them. This should be where someone like Matt Y. shines! It used to be where he shines. Unfortunately he's vanished into what feels like a cloud of fear, where he's willing to compromise on anything just to win the next election -- even the effectiveness of the winning coalition.
I can see why you feel this way about ICE funding, but I don't see how Laken Riley moves us toward one party rule.
Thank you for posting a comment with actual content. Don’t you feel better about this than your original content-free criticism?
To be frank, no. Not a very high ROI use of my time.
I think your follow up is good, and I agree with a lot of your points.
That being said, you didn’t prove your initial assertion about Matt underrating Trump’s danger, just that you disagree on strategy.
And like a few folks on here (and all over Twitter) we’re back to the “Trump is acting so stupidly that we might be able to be fine for this one particular election”. That got Biden elected the last time, but it’s not a formula for sustained success, and instead sets up for continued failure in the future. Trump’s current immigration approach is under water, but it would be easy for him (if he was psychologically capable) to just chill out 20% and have it be broadly popular. A future Republican could still do that and Democrats need to figure out a way to stop the excesses while strongly signaling that they are opposed to what happened during the Biden administration.
I feel the same about yours, they just have more words. You made a major claim about Matt. Let’s back it up with something other than “he didn’t think this vote on this bill is as important as I think it is.”
He has explained his theory of how to stop Trump over and over again and while I don’t agree with every sentence he says or on every vote, you’re claims are still histrionic and unsupported.
Someone who is genuinely worried about Trump would be acting more like Matt than like the average Democrat.
I've always had a huge problem with the cognitive dissonance that people have where they believe bad things will happen in a society at large but our small communities of friends, family or self will be spared any inconvenience. It's a common trap people fall into because they don't think deeply or they are so plainly irritated.
That said, I still think that Golden could've won re-election if he tried to run, and I feel like Angie Craig can still win in MN. We still have to have elections, I think Dems are mostly upset by what they seem as the lack of "fight" against MAGA and Trump and the desire by some moderates to do business as usual in that sense. It also doesn't help that too many people like MY, people in Congress or progressives specifically seem over indexed to social media and speaking on their loud speakers. They aren't representative of their actual constituents in most cases.
I do think MY is on to something though when he discussed the lack of real party leadership, and how Progressives still haven't learned the lessons of moderates winning more elections than "The Squad".
"I've always had a huge problem with the cognitive dissonance that people have where they believe bad things will happen in a society at large but our small communities of friends, family or self will be spared any inconvenience."
I mean, I guess this depends how you define 'society at large' and 'inconvenience' but I think the people believing that are mostly right? Like, the first trump administration involved a lot of bad things for society at large, but for me (and I'm guessing most folks) he didn't actually cause me or mine any personal harm.
Craig specifically is fine; she'll probably get in after Klobuchar resigns to become governor.
The broader problem that Craig types keep voting for substantively bad things that hurt the Democratic Party is less tractable.
What a banger of a Q/A column from Matt this morning. In addition to the answer that Ryan highlights, the gun control answer, the Amazon takedown, and the comments on the doomed history of Israeli olive branches are all column-worthy.
I think the dynamic Matt describes of a Democratic voting base which refuses to accept a majoritarian political strategy is a terrible risk for the country. Unless some emergent dynamic sweeps that away, the conclusion I come to is that it will be many elections before we have an effective, responsible political party, one that leads a majority of citizens to a better future. If that's the case, then the work for those of us who love our country is to build the electorate and the party that can resolve the tension between majoritarian institutions and our deeply unpopular core beliefs, by replacing most of the latter.
Yes, the problem with this strategy is that it very well may win the midterms but it is also blatantly a "rooting against America" strategy. Hoping for a mess the Democrats will manage better than the Republicans is pretty easy to condemn as immoral.
It also won’t work well enough to give Democrats the margins they need to do some necessary structural change.
I am a pro-choice feminists. States can keep making their own abortion laws. I think Americans are idiots about guns, but put a hand gun in every pot if need be.
We need to new anti-corruption laws. We need to get rid of the filibuster and expand Congress. We need to reform the federal courts. We need to regulate social media or we will perish.
“Hope” has little to do with it. Trump has fucked up the economy in ways that we are just beginning to grasp.
You can blame those benefiting politically for it, or place it where it’s due.
Yes, the problem with this strategy is that it very well may win the midterms but it is also blatantly a "rooting against America" strategy. Hoping for a mess the Democrats will manage better than the Republicans is pretty easy to condemn as immoral.
The man show is such an interesting example, because, like South Park, there was a moderating irony hiding a fundamental liberalism at its core. Jimmy Kimmel was one of the hosts! And more importantly, their writers rooms were full of the same kind of grad school/artist types who normally take those jobs, and their ideas percolated through. Obviously this was completely lost on plenty of guys who watched it, which is what drove part of the 2010s backlash against ironic racism and misogyny, but it's hard to argue that replacing them with a bunch of the biggest freaks on the planet was a change for the better.
I was just writing a comment up on this, but you beat me to it. It was so weird in that on the surface it always struck me in real time as icky and sexist, but it was unclear as to how seriously it should be taken. And given the different career trajectories of Kimmel and Carollo, maybe even they didnt entirely know collectively...
I remember even watching at the time I got the sense that Kimmel was in on the meta joke and Carolla wasn't. Their subsequent trajectories seem to have borne that out.
Exactly. I have a friend who *loathed* that show, and she *hated* when Kimmel became a night show host....only to be very pleasantly surprised on how his show turned out.
Is Carolla a sexist? I know he's a Republican...
I used to listen to him on KROQ Loveline in high school. I never got the sense he was sexist, especially by 1990s standards. But that was 30 years ago and I haven't checked if his brain's been fried in the last decade.
Loveline was pretty funny, a lot more than the Man Show.
Man show is totally lost on me, I need to watch some YouTube clips
I think Chappelle Show might be a better example from this era. There's plenty of stuff to appeal to young men (Great Moments In Hook Up History etc) while also sharp political insight with stuff like the blind klansman and Black Bush (which holds up remarkably well in the Age of Trump) or even making fun of crudish male behavior as being ultimately pathetic not alpha like "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" or "Let me holla at ya girl!" See also Season 1-3 of The Boondocks
> U.N. , you got problem with that? You know what you should do? You should sanction me. Sanction me with your army. Oh! wait a minute! You don't have an army! So I guess that means you need to shut the f*** up! That's what I would do if I don't have an army, I would shut the f*** up. Shut, the, f***, up!. That's right! Kofi Annan, you think I'm going to take orders from an African? You might speak sixteen languages, but you gonna need them when you in Times Square selling fake hats. And I know fake Gucci when I see it, n**** I'm rich!
Maybe I was in the wrong circles, but when I was in college and hanging out with guys, people would bring up Chappelle all the time, while no one would ever actually reference an actual joke on The Man Show. The show was more a vibe than something anybody seemed to remember the next morning.
Chappelle had interesting things to say at times (and plenty of juvenile stuff as well), Man Show really didn't (literally young women jumping on trampolines)
Man show was a couple years earlier but also definitely just something you would just kind of watch if it was on
Best way I can describe it is a semi-satirical revival of raunchy '80s humor. It's kayfabe, like pro wrestling. I never saw more than a few episodes because it felt like it was targeted at teenagers. (I was a few years too old to appreciate the humor on its own and a few years too young to appreciate it as a throwback).
It will surprise no one that Joe Rogan took over after Kimmel and Carolla left.
It’s old fashioned, conventional humor. And not to everyone’s taste. Now we have clapter, which isn’t actually comedy at all.
I watched exactly one episode of The Man Show after the hosts became Rogan and Stanhope, as all the irony was immediately gone and it just felt gross.
“Firearms deaths in the United States are mostly suicides, and gun homicides are overwhelmingly committed with small, cheap, easily concealed handguns—not ‘assault weapons.’
But when people pivot from that to ‘therefore preventing suicides is a major policy priority,’ an assumption is doing a lot of work.
The modal suicide isn’t a teenager in a transient crisis. It’s a middle-aged or older man, often divorced or otherwise socially disconnected, and frequently dealing with depression, substance use, or both.
That doesn’t mean these deaths are inevitable. But it does raise a harder question: how many suicides are short-term, reversible crises versus expressions of longer-running decline that we don’t have good tools to address?
If it’s mostly the former, then means restriction and crisis intervention make sense. If a large share is the latter, then simply ‘preventing the act’ risks treating the symptom while ignoring the actual harm.
It’s mostly the former. Suicide is mostly an impulsive thing that people attempt within 72 hours or less of deciding they want to take their own life. There is some “diversion” to other measures when one method of killing your self is no longer available but the net effect is to reduce overall suicides (based on a study of the UK banning a certain kind of gas stove).
In Canada, MAID has made it clear that providing an accessible and humane framework for suicide will increase demand.
It’s noteworthy that relatively few people choose death purely because of mental illness. Poverty and loneliness are big factors, but only a pretty small slice of Canadians who don’t have a very serious physical illness choose to die.
"In Canada, MAID has made it clear that providing an accessible and humane framework for suicide will increase demand" by people in the system encouraging others to kill themselves.
People are often troublesome and if you can get them to kill themselves and make your problems go away, it appears that's a good option for some.
Ain’t it tho? I’m all about it. That guy screaming at ghosts at the bus stop? Sounds like a way better option than the status quo
Sure, until you're having a rough week and complaining and someone thinks it might be the best option for you.
I don’t think that accounts for many MAID deaths. Of it does, so want to know
Older data found that most completed suicides were in people without mental illness. Newer data has found that most completed suicides are in people without mental illness mental illness but this eeems to be related to expanding definitions of mental illness (so on many cases the mental illness is not severe or serious) and researchers and coroners taking a completed suicide as proof of mental illness.
I guess my point is that we need a good understanding of the actual problem and current research is making that difficult
It doesn't make sense, but our best evidence indicates that it doesn't really matter, depriving people of an easy way of committing suicide results in those suicides mostly not happening.
The most striking version of this is the transition from high-CO domestic gas supplies to low-CO in the UK during the 1960s. (Sticking your head in an unlit oven kills you very reliably if your natural gas has a lot of CO in it, but it doesn't work if your natural gas doesn't come with CO.) Over the period from 1960-1970, suicides due to gas went effectively to zero, but suicides via other means stayed basically flat (they went up slightly in women and the young, down slightly among elderly men). There's no reason to believe that gas suicides were somehow only being done by those with short-term crises rather than longer-running decline, but we don't see those suicides shifting to other methods, they just disappear.
As I said, it's intuitive that some subset of people who commit suicide would do it by another means if you take away their preferred one, but as far as the evidence shows, it's also mostly wrong. If you make it harder to commit suicide by some easy means, most people don't shift to some other method, they just don't kill themselves.
Maybe this is TMI, but as someone who went through a severe bout of suicidal ideation many years ago, this definitely fits in with my lived experience. The thought process I would go through in the worst moments was always to go through a list of what would be the methods that were easiest to access, quickest, least painful, most likely to be successful, etc. It was extremely difficult to find anything that fit all those criteria, and I'm glad there wasn't a gun readily available because that would have probably been an easy method. But it wasn't like I was going to go out and try to buy a gun with all the process that involves, because a big part of depression, typically, is that you also have a real lack of motivation. You think about suicide, but if it's not easy and readily available, it often remains just a thought and doesn't turn into action.
The experience of San Francisco with the suicide net on the Golden Gate Bridge is another good example that is similar to that natural gas oven example in the UK. The Golden Gate Bridge was one of the most notorious places for suicides in the entire US, a massive rate of suicides per year, and the netting was hotly debated. Many people said it would just cause people to do it some other way. But the evidence seems to have been that suicide rates overall declined once this very obvious, very easy, very effective method had been removed as an option.
The data I’m aware for the US supports this. People without guns try less lethal methods and are likely to survive (often by changing their minds after taking pills, etc.). Guns are uniquely bad because they’re so lethal and convenient for people who have them.
Anecdotally, I work in an inpatient mental health facility and many of our clients have past suicide attempts. I don’t recall anyone who tried with a gun. Those people don’t appear to have a chance to change their minds and get treatment.
Interesting point. Although pretty irrelevant from the gun discussion in my opinion.
With the gas stoves a different put a product that still heats.Your food is just as good.You.Just get rid of the suicides.
But with guns, there is no other product that fulfills that need
I think the question here that always puzzles anti-gun people is: what need? If you're escorting your kids to school in the Aleutian Islands and need to protect them from Kodiak bears, sure, that seems like a need. But generally, being a "good guy with a gun" absolutely does not protect you from criminals with guns.
This is actually not true. there are many many many documented cases each year where serious crime is prevented or stopped because of an armed citizen.
https://www.legalreader.com/defensive-gun-use-statistics-americas-life-saving-gun-incidents-2024/
https://www.lawofficer.com/cprc-study-shows-legally-armed-citizens-effective-stopping-active-shooters/
or some specific anecdotes
https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/03/14/8-times-law-abiding-citizens-saved-lives-ar-15/
My problem with these studies is that there are usually multiple things wrong with the basic premises. To persuade me that you need a gun for self-defense, you would have to prove that using a gun for self-defense is more effective than other methods of self-defense. In fact, you'd have to prove that using a gun for self-defense is so much more effective that it offsets the additional risk of death and injury that the gun's presence adds to the situation. The absolute number of defensive gun uses tells me nothing about this type of analysis. All it tells me is that a bunch of people got out their guns when faced with a situation they thought was a potential crime.
My experience in urban areas with gangs tells me that the presence of armed people usually turns fist fights into murders. Let's just say a guy is trying to mug someone. If neither of them have a gun (say the mugger has a knife), the mugger either succeeds or the victim runs away. The crime could be successful, but no one gets shot. If the mugger has a gun, the crime is much more likely to succeed, since running from a knife is much safer than running from a gun. Sometimes the gun will go off accidentally and someone will die; this is how one of my friends died while I was a teenager. If both the mugger and the victim have guns, it's possible that the victim can scare off the mugger, but it's pretty likely that they never have a chance to get their gun out because the mugger has the first-mover advantage and is much more likely to be used to pointing the gun at people than a law-abiding citizen. The mugger might try to shoot first out of fear for their life. Additionally, if they get in a fire fight, stray bullets can kill and injure bystanders; this is how a 7-year-old girl was killed when I was a teenager, because she was practicing piano near the front window and the stray bullet killed her. In any case, this situation is very chaotic; it could result in the victim successfully deterring their attacker, but I think it's also pretty likely that multiple people get shot.
The only situation that seems really likely to be helped by the "good guy with a gun" is if the mugger isn't armed and the victim is. That seems like the least likely scenario to me, but it's possible. Also not guaranteed to work, because sometimes criminals notice the gun and steal it as well, or struggle over it and the gun goes off unpredictably.
These scenarios just change a lot with any other self-defense strategy. Pepper spray, tasers, self-defense techniques, even knives and crowbars- none of these have stray bullet problems.
This is aside from the fact that I think when gun owners are surveyed about their defensive gun uses, I doubt them as reliable narrators. I've seen enough guys "prevent fights" by flashing their guns after they've said something that normally would've started something to wonder whether a lot of the crimes they "prevent" are things that would've deescalated prior to crime-level if no one was armed. It's hard to measure that kind of counterfactual- someone would have to have a very cleverly designed study to persuade me on that front.
Need to look at averages not anecdotes, can find an anectdote for anything. I'm pro gun btw. Closer to republicans then Democrats on this one issue.
1. Hunting is a huge cultural thing for much of the country
2. Guns & shooting are a fun hobby. People get into upgrading their rifles, the same way car enthusiasts like to hotrod their cars. There's a whole aftermarket ecosystem for ARs, etc.
3. You have zero self-defense needs, really? If a violent criminal broke into my house at night and threatened my family I could defend them. What would you do?
1. It's an increasingly niche hobby- only around 5% of Americans hunt nowadays. That said, I don't object to it. If a person has a hunting license, I have no objection to them owning guns that are suitable for hunting, especially since those are generally not handguns.
2. I understand that this is true, but you have to understand that it is totally unsympathetic to people like me. It's like saying that you have a poison hobby and spend a lot of time concocting ever more lethal poisons. I get that people find it fun, but having something in your house that can easily kill you where its only purpose is fun or killing stuff seems a little deranged to me.
3. Home invasion by strangers is while residents are home is exceptionally rare. Generally when someone wants to rob your house, they scout for a while beforehand to make sure that you're not going to be home when they come. I also have a dog who is noisy, which deters people from invading my house because they don't want her to wake up the whole neighborhood. In the very unlikely event that someone did invade my home, I'd prefer to barricade myself in a defensible room and use a heavy object to bludgeon the person if they managed to get through the barricade, because my assumption is that this person would be invading at night and I am much more confident in my ability to whack someone in the head with my trusty crowbar than I am in my ability to definitely shoot the invader and not any of my relatives in the dark. Also, the crowbar does not require unlocking and loading it to be available for self-defense, but I would certainly not be comfortable with a gun easily accesible for self-defense in a house in which toddlers live.
1. Aside from my skepticism that the average hunter is responding to surveys, your 6% (it's not 5%) number just measures a single year. My best estimate is that 30% of Americans have ever hunted in their lives
2. 'Poison hobby' is exactly what alcohol is- do you drink? Maybe socially with your friends or family? Perhaps it's been a part of socializing throughout your life, woven into family events, weddings, catching up with friends, celebrations, wakes, birthdays, etc.? Because alcohol kills more than 3-5x the number of Americans than guns do every year, once you measure not just immediate deaths but homicides, car crashes, domestic violence, etc. It doesn't seem 'deranged' to you because it's a normalized part of your culture..... perhaps you seem my point
(Also people enjoy working on cars even though car crashes kill more people every year than guns, etc.)
3. There appear to be slightly more than a million burglaries every year *when the homeowner is present in the home*. Or slightly more than a quarter of all burglaries. I'm sure it's easy to theorize about how you'd perform with a crowbar in hand at extreme close range, where the other guy (who probably has a lot more street fighting experience) can simply grab you and take it away
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vdhb.pdf
So, while I agree a teenage suicide is more tragic than an 85 year-old man with cancer killing himself (although the latter is still mortifying, my 2x great grandpa did this and his family had to find him with his head blown off, don't do it guys), the problem of old man suicide isn't completely intractable, it just probably requires family intervention. If grandpa lives alone in a rural area, somebody in the family should offer to hold his guns for him and if he wants to go hunting or something, it can be a family event.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/suicide-in-wyoming/
I would have liked to help my grandmother end her suffering but wasn’t willing to risk prison.
Even absent terminal illness, older men face problems that are not very tractable. Sixty percent of single women over 40 don’t want a partner. This number increases with age. So if you get divorced and are middle aged and aren’t particularly rich or charming, you are likely to be very lonely. And that’s before your body starts falling apart.
Data on suicide attempts vs completion is poor, but based on available data, that gap in relationship availability isn’t necessarily explanatory. Women are believed to attempt suicide more often than men, but choose less lethal means.
An unsuccessful attempt is often insincere and aimed at influencing others.
Never ran into that as somebody who works in mental health with a population with high suicide attempt rates. People are in real pain and don't see a way out, so they try to kill themselves. My clients didn't use guns, so they're alive, but they were quite sincere in their pain.
Sincerity in pain does not equate to sincerity in wanting to die
I'm not suicidal, but if I was I would:
-Use a gun, because it's fast.
-Do it outdoors to make cleanup easy.
-Call the police right before so a police officer and EMTs deal with my body rather than a neighbor or family member.
I'm not suicidal, but if I was I would:
- Use a wakizashi, because it is the proper way to do it.
- Do it sitting on a tatami mat for comfort.
- Nominate a close friend as kaishakunin to decapitate me with a single blow of a sword at the correct moment, leaving my head hanging by a thin strand of connective tissue to prevent an unsightly roll.
I’m not suicidal but I have a pistol to keep my options open if things deteriorate.
Jesus dude lol
There was a period where "deaths of despair" where a major thing discussed in political circles but it mostly seems to have burnt itself out, perhaps because a lot of the fentanyl crisis also burnt itself out with the deaths of its victims.
Why? I guess I can think of individual situations in which suicide is a bad choice, but I can think of many situations in which suicide seems acceptable.
For example, a terminal cancer patient in extreme pain with weeks to live and zero chance of recovery. Why would it be immoral for them to commit suicide?
Thank you for identifying yourself as someone I should mute.
I guess that's an alternative to compassion
i reject your absurd morality
Yes, Sharon’s stroke probably made zero difference.
But Olmert ran (and won) on a platform of withdrawing from the West Bank (right after the Gaza withdrawal)… not sure the lame duck aspect had anything to do with it. (The only way Sharon’s stroke makes a difference is if he somehow averts the 2006 Lebanon war, which scuttled the plan.)
It’s really not like lame ducks were sneaking in peace plans and then the population was saying “wait, what, no!!! we never expected this!”
If you look at the Israeli right’s rhetoric about these deals, moreover, it’s always “they’re lying and will use any inch of land for more terror,” not “god has given us East Jerusalem.” There are good reasons to despise these guys, but the history of Oslo and unilateral withdrawals has proven this particular diagnosis correct.
It’s also not even really true that religion is the *biggest* source of intractability on the Palestinian side. It’s right of return. In a way, the right of return is actually the essence of the Palestinian national myth, the same way that the basis for our national myth is embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
At this point, it’s obvious that the pitch for any peace deal will have to be “despite the increased danger, you should do this because it’s moral” rather than “this will actually bring peace” (because it won’t).
A more accurate diagnosis would be: there was a constituency for “land in exchange for peace,” but never “land in exchange for war.” You can fault Israelis for this, but it will be refreshing if everyone is honest that these are the stakes.
You're just wrong on this. Religion is the driver of the conflict. The swing votes on both sides are held by religious nuts, and a lot of other people know that elite liberal society doesn't like religious justifications so they conceal them. But when you hear an ostensibly secular Jew say "why shouldn't we get to build houses in Judea?", 90%+ of the time that person actually thinks the invisible man in the sky wants the Muslims out and just won't admit it.
Similarly while obviously dumb leftism is one driver of Palestinian nationalism, a whole bunch of the people in the anti-Zionist movement are just obvious radical Islamists. Plus, the Left loves defending radical Islam simply because it is anti-Western.
Religion is the major reason the conflict is so difficult to solve. The world's irrational, woo-filled, narrowminded jerks concentrate on the region.
One other thing- right to return IS religion. It's actually a fantasy about civil war. The notion isn't "we'll return and live in peace with the Jews". Literally everyone who is not an idiot knows the point of right of return is to re-run the 1948 civil war with Jews either fleeing the war zone or losing to the Palestinians this time. Which gets back to this conflict being driven by religious nuts.
I sympathize with your point in a sense — religious nut jobs are certainly causing a huge share of the problems right now. I’ll try to explain why my diagnosis is nevertheless that religion is not the ultimate source of the conflict.
On the Arab side, the current Islamist war on Israel has deep roots in an older idea, which is kind of a “Make Arabia Great Again” attitude that emerged in the late 19th century. You can find Islamic scholars writing about this going way back, but this ideology has also had secular manifestations, like pan-Arabism. Right now Islamism is the dominant *means* to this end because the “muqawama” ideology and tactics have allowed it to succeed where pan-Arabism failed. Islamism can persist through the utter destruction of societies, since it views that as redemption.
At bottom, though, I see this from their side as being about reversing the Nakba (properly understood as the catastrophe, the humiliation, rather than how it’s understood in the West).
From the Israeli side, yes, agreed that religious crazies are responsible for the gravest abuses in the West Bank, enabled by the crazies controlling the police/security. But I think that even absent the crazies, we don’t have a withdrawal from the occupation (although we probably would from the far-out settlements).
How many secular Jews do you know who would accept the following terms: leave the West Bank, and be repaid in rivers of blood? A third terrorist group will emerge on your borders. Keep in mind that Israelis will have to fight under the “mulligan” principle — those terrorists will be able to try again and again without ever losing land. My guess is that it’s not only religious Jews who would reject this.
Most conflicts like this get solved with a deal, despite everyone having their historical theories. Think the British and Irish don't have historical theories?
The difference is that this conflict is driven and fed by religious nuts.
"Most conflicts like this get solved with a deal,"
No they don't. Most conflicts get resolved because one side wins and the other side is either destroyed, absorbed, or leaves. Two groups in conflict over the same land has rarely if ever been resolved with a deal.
And even these "deals" are often fragile, as in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. India and Pakistan just went to war again!
India and Pakistan have battles but in actuality the cold peace between them is a fabulous accomplishment that has allowed India to become a major economic power.
There usually is a deal even if it's just implicit, but it's a deal where the losing side understands it has lost and settles for a permanent lesser outcome.
Sure. If you want to describe one side winning and forcing the other side to leave and/or take whatever scraps the winner leaves them as a "deal" then okay. But group conflict over land has historically been extremely fierce and brutal, regardless of motivation and ethnic/religious/etc. "cleansing" has been the historical norm, not the exception.
I guess I’d distinguish general nuttery from religious nuttery. I really struggle to understand the preferences of a Palestinian nationalist who prefers to continue fighting. Like, the PA won’t give up on right of return. Seems insane to me — why not surrender? I understand the secular Jewish preferences I described above much better, but not the “let’s conquer the Wild West Bank.”
Keep in mind, also, that although most conflicts eventually resolve, some last hundreds of years! (Eg Greeks vs Turks.)
Even if Pals all of a sudden adopted the dispositions of Danes, the conflict would not end because Israel wants to evict or ghettoize all Arabs in the West Bank until they eventually take it over. Probably would have been better off either pushing the Arabs over the Jordan back in 1948 or leaving the WB to Jordan.
Israeli society has always been split, though not evenly, about their weighting of territorial integrity and Jewish sovereignty. The majority (my estimate is ~2/3) has for a long time tended to value Jewish sovereignty, and was willing to give up territorial claims for that. The remaining 1/3 was committed to the territorial integrity of Israel.
This was the case during the Yishuv, when the majority Labor Zionists agreed to the Peel Commission Plan and the Partition plans. This was true during the pace agreement with Egypt and the return of Sinai. This was true during the peace process in the 1990s and the 2000s.
What happened is that the Second Intifada, and the repeated attacks from Lebanon and Gaza after Israel's respective withdrawals from these places made it clear to Israelis that a Palestinian state would be used as a launching point for terror. It convinced Israelis that the Palestinian national movement prioritizes destroying Zionism than building a stable, prosperous state for Palestinians beside Israel. For Gaza, withdrawal meant putting primarily far-flung kibbutzim and border towns at risk. For the West Bank, which is on Jerusalem's municipal boundary and on higher ground overlooking Ben Gurion Airport and Tel Aviv, the security situation is more dire.
So the debate now isn't between territorial integrity or Jewish sovereignty. Both approaches of negotiation of the peace process and unilateral action did not succeed in separating Israel from the Palestinians. So people are convinced that to maintain Israeli security, you need control of the territories.
The security considerations have changed, but the underlying ideology hasn't. If the security threats went away, and Israelis could trust that a Palestinian state would not be used as a launching pad for terror, with the ultimate goal of the elimination of Israel and the vulnerability of its citizens, a majority (my guess is 2/3) will go back to supporting a 2-state for 2-peoples solution, in which Israel relinquishes the control of the vast majority of the West Bank.
I don't think this comment reflects a realistic understanding of Israeli society. Israelis will not deploy their sons to the West Bank and Gaza, putting them in danger and preventing their society from dealing with more pressing problems (Lebanon, Iran), purely for the sake of being mean to Arabs. It's hard to overstate how sensitive this society is to military casualties and hostages.
Yes, Israelis want the West Bank. Many want it badly. However, they currently have only a very small piece of it, and much of the desire to conquer the territory comes from the fact that it would add strategic depth to Israel.
If Palestinians could credibly commit to peace, and used that as a bargaining chip for a deal, it would immediately be popular in Israel. (Also, the entire issue of evacuating settlements would become somewhat moot, since these Danes would get along much better with any Jewish stragglers left behind in the new Palestinian state.)
One thing to contemplate though: if Palestinians *unilaterally* committed to peace without striking a deal, then the conflict would likely continue until the Israelis felt satisfied. I think it's worth it for liberals to keep this in mind when suggesting various unilateral moves Israel could make to defuse the conflict.
“Keep in mind, also, that although most conflicts eventually resolve, some last hundreds of years! (Eg Greeks vs Turks.)”
With big population transfers.
Let's not mince words. Call it what it is: ethnic cleansing and sometimes genocide.
Umm, there aren’t religious nuts in Northern Ireland? Have you met any Free Presbyterian members?
There were but the Troubles becoming an ethnic conflict rather than a religious conflict was such a thing you got regular jokes about being asked if you're a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist. For the most part it wasn't driven by any real theology, major figures in the IRA/Sinn Fein/UVF/DUP weren't motivated by religious belief. The religion was mostly used as a proxy for the ethnic groups, Catholicism was mostly used by the descendents of the original Irish and Protestantism was mostly used by the descendents of the Scottish planter class.
The Troubles is probably a bad example here though because understanding it properly requires a fairly deep understanding of Irish history and the European wars of religion and does have religious links.
A big, gaping difference between Northern Ireland and Historic Palestine is simply that while Catholics and Protestants have religious differences, neither side thinks Ulster is Holy Land given to them by God.
So while obviously religion is a big part of the story of the Troubles, it's still relatively straightforward to secularize and then compromise on the conflict.
In Historic Palestine, THE big thing that prevents that is religion. Both sides literally think that a deity gave them the land to the exclusion of the other.
Exactly. The Troubles clearly has religious links and so using it as an example of a non religious conflict seems incorrect.
Yes, this is what the right of return is about. It’s an attempt to create a majority Palestinian state in Israel and end the state. That’s why it is often coupled with an end to the Jewish right of return.
“But when you hear an ostensibly secular Jew say "why shouldn't we get to build houses in Judea?", 90%+ of the time that person actually thinks the invisible man in the sky wants the Muslims out and just won't admit it.”
Doubtful. You’re discounting that they could easily be completely secular and think it’s just better for the Jews to control the whole area given that the Palestinians will misuse any control they have.
How many Israelis even care about preserving some homeland for the Palestinian people at this point? Gaza was always the bit of land the Israelis didn’t care about and look what happened there when the Palestinians were left to their devices.
No, it's religious. Actual secular Jews know that building houses in Judea makes Israeli security worse. It's about the sky fairy giving Jews the land.
But that’s just not true. Yisrael Beiteinu (originally founded to represent the interests of post-Soviet immigrants) is one of the most assertively secular Jewish political parties and one of the most opposed to giving up the West Bank because secular prime ministers on both the left and right realized that the most cost-effective way to house one million immigrants in the 80s and 90s was to dump them in cinder block apartments in the occupied territories. This leads to wild cases where the party’s more moderate, pro-two-state solution wing envisions massive border redrawing so that they’re within Israel and the majority-Arab regions in the Galilee and Negev end up in Palestine.
The fact is that there are two separate pro-settlement blocs: one is religious and sees them in messianic terms and one is largely secular and sees it primarily as a housing issue.
I hate to tell you this but a lot of people lie in Israeli politics
So Beiteinu are faking their hardline support for eliminating religious education, abolishing ultra orthodox draft exemptions, and introducing civil marriage and greater protections for immigrants’ non-Jewish spouses—all to obtain the support of overwhelmingly secular voters who disproportionately live in secular West Bank settlements—because their Soviet immigrant leadership are secretly Orthodox? Or Shimon Peres spent nine decades pretending to be secular (when that secularism was what caused the Dirty Trick—his biggest political maneuver—to fail) so no one would realize that the settlements he had the government build, completely separate from the ones constructed by grassroots orthodox movements, were an attempt to initiate the messianic age?
There’s already so much to hate about Israel’s secular right and places like Ariel. I cannot imagine why you would choose to believe something obviously untrue about them, when that (I.e, messianic Orthodoxy) already applies to plenty of other, separate, detestable things about the occupation.
Me as a kid, lifelong atheist: "Mom, why are [Palestineand Israel] fighting?"
Mom, also atheist: "Religion!"
Me: "It doesn't make sense..."
Mom: "Never has to me either...."
Separating the ethno-centric nuts and the religio-centric nuts seems like not that useful an exercise. Matt has a couple of hobby horse theories he's trying to discourse lawyer for, which is his prerogative.
There's an interesting dynamic on how anti-peace deal factions on both sides can easily defect and weaken the pro-deal faction on the otherside to block a deal. But that's mostly orthogonal to the particular ideologies.
In this case of the Israelis you've got one of the few surviving Iron Age village gods telling them that they're the Chosen People and as proof you've got the Old Testament spinning tales of land theft and genocide that somehow justify the current position.
Maybe we should just stop pretending they're a Western state and instead treat them like we would Saudi Arabia.
The problem with that is they are a Western state.
I know at this point gay rights is almost a cliche in Israel discourse, but it matters that gay people can basically live free lives in Israel and they can't in Muslim states in the region. Or that Israel has a free press and the neighboring countries do not. Or that Israel is a successful, tech-friendly, democratic, capitalist society and some of the countries in the region are elitist petrostate monarchies.
None of that is a justification for the settlers or the Israeli right or the resistance to peace initiatives, but it is, fundamentally, a truism that Israel is in fact not Saudi Arabia.
I don't think this will produce the outcome you want. If the US started treating Israel like they treat Saudi Arabia, they would be even more solicitous of their interests, potentially create bases within the country to defend them, excuse any human rights violations they make in the interest of the broader relationship, and have regular groups of people paid by Israel found think tanks and write opinion pieces defending the country. Saudi Arabia has huge influence and sway in American political and economic decision-making. Maybe that's what you want, but I doubt it.
Well what I'd really like to do is treat them like Iran (minus the bombing) since I think they're only a few decades away from that. Boomer Israel will be long dead by then and the idiots who mandate that elevator buttons don't work on Saturday will be running absolutely everything.
Not trying to "achieve" anything, just tearing down the pretense that they're more like Americans than say the Japanese or Koreans.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are not the same kind of state. For one thing, Saudi Arabia is a monarchy where the monarchy has real power and has entered into a relationship of convenience with radical Wahhabi clerics, while keeping the military weak and ineffective. Iran is a theocratic republic with semi-democratic elections and a strong military partially independent of the rest of the state.
Ethnocentrism is a lot easier to cut a deal over (it has happened numerous times in human history) as opposed to dividing up the land that an imaginary but fervently believed in deity literally "gave" to one or the other religious group.
By the way Dilan, I read your megathread [https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1950106310504071380] on debunking common religious claims earlier this week, and wanted to say to you that I liked it. It was well laid out without getting into New Atheist style smuggery.
Thanks. I add to it every once in awhile late at night. There are more arguments to cover.
I'll look forward to it. I don't know how much you care to publish on your Substack, but it would also be cool to read it there, free of some of the friction that tweets have.
I found that Twitter gets more engagement than substack.
That's a mixed blessing, at best.
Fair. I'm not saying one or the other, it's just sometimes more difficult to find certain things to look up on the Twitter thread. But certainly understandable if doing both is too much work for you.
Really well said.
While there is a segment of Israeli society religiously committed to complete territorial integrity, this segment (mostly from the Dati leumi community) has always been the minority.
Even the most hard line of these people who want to settle the land for religious reasons only settle the part of the land under IDF protection. They don’t settle area A, or Jordan or Lebanon.
The point is that the right wing objected to the concessions because they feared that Palestinians would use their newly established state to create a launching pad for terror.
Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza (done by the center right against the objections of the rest of the right) has proved these concerns correct, as much as it pains me to admit it as a liberal Zionist who believes in self determination for Palestinian Arabs.
I think you're right that the intractability on the Israeli side (ignoring the Palestinian side for the moment) is that mistreating Palestinians does indeed make Israel better off. The reason not to mistreat the Palestinians is that it's immoral, not that the lives of Israelis would be better off if they treated Palestinians better.
Not precisely what Unset was asking for, but I recently read and enjoyed Luka Jukic's book "Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea" about the history of central Europe (the region and the concept), in which the Austrian Habsburgs obviously feature quite heavily.
Matt’s unveiling of the Amazon slop on the subject was generally unsettling to me this is happening too fast.
To be fair(?), those kinds of shoddy books actually predate AI by a decade or maybe more, but they used to be made by literally just compiling a bunch of relevant Wikipedia pages into a printed volume. I think AI is just making them less encyclopedia-like and smoothing the content into something more like a traditional history book.
Watson's Ring of Steel and The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemsyl are both really excellent on the A-H experience of the War.
Thanks, I’ll check this out.
The #1 problem with moderates is that they keep doing stupid and/or evil shit and then expecting voters to excuse it with "well, they're moderate." Sorry, no. Being a moderate isn't license to undergo a brain amputation and replace it with nowcast polling.
The Laken Riley Act was a horrible piece of legislation, as basically every one of the law-talkin guys pointed out at the time. Moderates decided to pass it in order to... what, get one or two slightly less bad news cycles? The reward calculus was all effed up there. Similarly, the decision to fund the Trump government without condition in March 2025 looks almost unimaginably bad at this point, with the DHS shutdown having genuinely produced positive results and, conversely, the Trumpists having completely ignored Democratic funding priorities in implementing the March unilateral surrender. Suozzi, instead of sack-dancing about correctly calling the unpopularity of the trans-women-in-women's-sports issue, is desperately trying to justify his dumbass behavior on ICE funding.
(As an aside, it's not actually clear to me who supposedly "hounded" Jared Golden out of Congress. Maybe this is some widely acknowledged thing among Congress-knowers, like "the Groups," that normies just are out of touch with. If so, it would be useful to know that. So far all I've seen is some whining from Golden personally.)
My preference in red areas would be for Dems who are substantively moderate but procedurally tenacious. But I will vote for a procedurally tenacious leftist every day of the week and twice on Sunday over a substantive moderate who won't actually have the courage of their convictions. Letting elected officials cook is an unacceptable strategy when they keep serving up moose turd pie.
Yeah if the moderates were doing a solid job holding the line it'd be one thing but they're performatively finding extremely unwise places to surrender which just makes moderation seem like capitulation rather than any kind of wisdom.
Politicians in general drastically overrate the importance of votes to their political survival. I don't know if this is a psychological defense mechanism or what.
Literally not one person is going to vote for John Fetterman because he voted to confirm some dipshit who would have voted against him had he voted no. The idea that voters are somehow tracking particular votes and will remember in November is just... I don't even know where to start with that level of cloud-cuckoo-landism.
If you stake out a consistent position toward the center of the political spectrum and then vote consistently with that position, I think you will reap (modest, but real) rewards for it. If you are just a weathervane who votes against Democratic priorities 25% of the time with no rhyme or reason for it other than "gotta be moderate," I think the political rewards for that are either zero or actively negative. Most Democratic "moderates" are of the latter variety; they couldn't explain their political philosophy if you gave them half a season of Schoolhouse Rock to do it with.
Or maybe they're choosing to "moderate" on the issues where they are actually "moderate" and are therefore out of touch with voters
Was it evil and stupid for Joe Manchin to pare back Biden's big spending bill because of inflation concerns, or was Matt right to give him cover? Were activists right on the money when they supported a leftist primary challenger for senator of West Virginia? Voting for "a procedurally tenacious leftist" is not a very good strategy for getting senators in key swing states, and centrist concerns can't be waved away or dismissed offhand -- leftist convictions are wrong all the time!
Probably-- he lost his seat anyway, and the bill contained a lot fewer durable policy changes. I think Manchin's tactical instincts were pretty terrible. He consistently picked weird, off-putting things to moderate on. He only looks smart by comparison when put next to Golden or Kyrsten Sinema.
That said, WV is SO red now that it's not clear to me that any Democrat or independent could win there without the benefit of legacy Dixiecrat status.
I know Matt agrees with me about the importance of moderates not being stupid wimps-- he's posted about it before-- he just doesn't seem to have any idea for how to get there from here. Neither do I, to be honest.
I thought the deal with Manchin is that he thought those durable policy changes were bad and didn't want them to happen, not that it was some kind of political strategy.
Correct; he was a moron who thought that giving money to poor moms would cause them to all start doing drugs or some shit. In so doing, he grievously damaged the Democratic Party's standing with lower-income Americans for zero benefit.
It wasn't a stratagem, but it was absolutely evil and stupid, which was my original point.
Do you have another proposed explanation for Jared Golden’s decision?
Congress seems like a job that sucks right now and having a job that sucks while doing things you think is right but makes many of the people you think should be on your side be mad at you also suck.
Well there's the fairly obvious one that he can now go get a job that pays him zillions of dollars to lobby for corporate causes, a la Sinema. That's nearly always what happens with these Blue Dog types after leaving Congress.
I think it's because he represented a Trump +9 district.
Anyone have direct access to Mayor Michelle Wu?
"Fundamentally, though, I think that if you’re looking at a city like San Francisco or New York or Boston and wanting to make it more family-friendly, spending a bunch of money on child care subsidies is not where I would start. The most important thing, by far, is to make it easier to add market rate housing, especially in the places where the land values are highest. After that, it’s improving the management of your existing K-12 schools and maintaining public order on the streets."
Wu is supporting the restrictive rent control measure, which is disappointing.
Agreed, this is a problem for her and for housing creation in Boston.
Boston is gonna Boston
Wu is a political child of Elizabeth Warren. So, her shittiness on housing is drearily predictable.
I don't think Wu is quite as disappointing as her mentor. She has to fill potholes, after all. But on housing she's been a bitter disappointment. More or less the Anti-Hochul.
Wu says she is working on all these things.
That's the problem. She's been mayor for 5 years and is still running studies, building consensus, hiring consultants, etc rather than doing meaningful things.
The goal is to spend money not fix yhe issues
That's what the stadium is for
Yes, I agree with this description of her approach. There seems to be a clear disagreement on strategy here. Wu prefers a go-slow, bring together a coalition, adjust to do coalition management approach as opposed to a top-down, move fast and break things approach. I have my own preferences here, but I don't know enough about Boston city factions to have a clear sense on which political strategy is correct here. I haven't lived in Boston proper in a long time.
Empirically, Walsh's administration was faster and more effective at granting permits and producing new construction (business and housing) than either Wu's or Menino's. Menino was widely viewed as wanting to control and channel housing his way. Wu seems to have the same approach, just with a different set of interests to appease.
Agreed with all of that.
Wu worked for Menino and is essentially winning on the same coalition ( https://commonwealthbeacon.org/politics/wu-replicates-the-menino-margin-and-map/ ) so it makes sense. Its just disappointing. At least on housing Mumbles was a disaster.
I did not appreciate that they had the same map. Many things make more sense to me now. Thanks!
I remember sports radio guys competing to do the best Mumbles impression. Good times.
I have heard that incarcerating people with illegal guns is racist. It disproportionately affects certain minorities here in the KC area. We just can’t lock people up with illegal guns because it feeds the school to prison pipeline.
Matt has previously touched on that issue in enforcement of DC-area gun laws.
Several years ago on the Weeds he had a guest who had done some research into gun crime in KC, but I can't remember the name. He had examined a "natural experiment" situation of before/after Missouri loosened concealed carry rules in 2007 iirc.
Wish he had linked to it. Would like to refresh myself since I try to read Matt regularly.
When we find out a policy has disproportionate impact, we can keep doing it, stop doing it, or find a way to make it less racist. No one ever picks the less racist option because it's really hard.
Whenever I hear disproportionate impact I have visions of people claiming the SAT is racist because different races score differently. I also think of Griggs v. Duke Power which I despise and wish to see overturned in my lifetime.
"You probably end up with a significantly larger Ralph Nader vote in 2004 than you had in 2000, plus Republicans nominating John McCain on a moderate platform. I think this means Gore loses his re-election bid badly."
Always interesting to me gaming out these things. Agree with all of that, you likely then still get a bad economy by 2008, meaning a President McCain loses his re-election campaign. But without an Iraq war, more likely that Hillary Clinton is the Dem nominee than Obama, and you end up with a Hillary Presidency from 2009-2016. 2016 would then see Obama run and probably end up as a stronger nominee to go up against Trump that year, than Hillary in reality was.
All in all, fair to say that the old lib theory that the world would be much better if Gore had won in 2000 is probably true, even if he'd likely lost in 2004.
Without an Iraq War, neocons aren't completely discredited, and the 2016 election goes closer to plan: someone like Jeb! or Marco is probably the nominee
And an 8-1 majority in the court!
How are you getting to that? Thomas would still be on the Court. 2004 was a bonanza election for SCOTUS, so McCain would still get Rehnquist and O'Connor's seats that doesn't change the balance. Then Hillary gets the Stevens, Souter, and RBG seats that doesn't change it either. Obama gets Scalia's seat to finally tip the balance. It's very hard seeing Obama getting reelected amid the pandemic, which means Kennedy can hold on until a Republican wins in 2020. Breyer also might not step down.
So that 5-4 Democratic appointees, which is a major change, but the balance still very close.
Roughly: what you have plus Kennedy's replacement. So 6-3
And I doubt McCain nominates Alito.
So of the 3 you have Roberts and a Roberts-like figure. And both of them would vote more like the 6 than like Thomas.
As a lay person I think Roberts and Kagan are the best and I'd be thrilled if the whole bench was staffed by their kind.
Except, as I said, there's a good chance Kennedy holds on for a Republican, and he can probably get one in 2021.
I don't know who McCain precisely nominates, but remember that Dubya originally nominated Harriet Miers, but was then bullied into pulling her and replacing her with the widely acclaimed Alito. So I wouldn't rule out an Alito type from McCain.
Ok, a 5-4 plus Roberts & Kennedy is still very very good.
Indeed. It's still one that's very contingent to flip back, though. The question would be how many of Kennedy, Thomas, and the other two Republican appointees retire under the Republican president that I see beating Obama. We might get some clarity on Thomas this summer. If all four retire strategically, then it's still on the edge. I would imagine that the Republican that beats Obama is a one termer, and then it comes down to how many Democratic appointees step down in the present.
Always fun stuff to think about here.
I would not assume 9/11 still occurs under Gore, nor even if it did that we wouldn't have killed bin Laden before 2004.
Given Hillary's weaker campaign skills, how confident are you she wins in 2012? I am not.
Here was my attempt at finding a gun policy that would be workable both in actually cutting down gun violence and being politically viable. Note that I don't necessarily endorse this, and would blatantly violate DC v. Heller in any case:
--Existing guns may be possessed as is.
--Same with single shot bolt action hunting rifles.
--All other new guns and ammo must be housed at licensed gun ranges.
The idea here is very slowly breaking the fever of the idea of guns for protecting oneself, while keeping plenty of avenues for recreational gun shooting open, and also recognizing how daunting it is to try to claw back all the existing guns out there. It would take a very long time to make a dent, and since it would satisfy very few in the short term, it's unlikely in any case. But that was my attempt. Now we'll see if Dave Coffin shows up to poke all kinds of holes in this.
I just don’t think this is politically viable
Almost nothing that would seriously cut down gun deaths would be!
Yeah
That was the prompt, to ignore political viability!
The whole point of having a gun is to protect yourself.
The shooting range is just to stay in practice
That is in no way compatible with the 2nd Amendment. It is therefore not sensible.
The only possibly sensible policy would be to step up enforcement on existing gun laws, which means reliably pursuing, arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning the criminals.
"and would blatantly violate DC v. Heller in any case"
I.e., not sensible.
The whole point of LF's question was to set that aside.
Ok.
That solves one part of the problem, but the other part of the gun problem in the U.S. (which Matt touches on sort of) is irresponsible behavior by otherwise law abiding gun owners that results in lots of accidental shootings and quite a few guns being stolen and then used in crimes. When my uncle died recently, one of the things his son had to do was go around the house, the garage, and all of his cars and secure about a dozen loaded handguns he had stashed all over the place -- including in places where the grandkids probably had access to them. And he lived in the middle of nowhere. Very low crime. He'd never been robbed or been a victim of a crime. Just thought he needed to have a loaded gun within reach at all times.
I'm not sure what the solution is to preventable gun deaths like kids picking up a loaded, unsecured gun and accidentally shooting themselves or someone else; kids taking their parents' guns and committing crimes; people with dementia accidentally shooting people with the horde of guns they accumulated before they lost their faculties, etc. But that represents a chunk of gun deaths that could be addressed through legislation around liability, maybe, without threatening ownership. I would think gun owners would have some interest in addressing this type of stuff, since it involves law abiding gun owners shooting themselves, each other, or their loved ones in non-crime-related circumstances, but I haven't heard any practical or politically viable suggestions on that front.
<500 accidental gun deaths per year in the US. I don't mean to minimize them, but they seem tough to solve and just not as common as many other sources of accidental deaths.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/
We already have negligent homicide laws.
You can make it compatible with the 2nd Amendment by requiring that new guns be purchased through a licensed “militia” that is responsible for the guns being used responsibly. Failure to do so would result in the militia losing its license and its guns
Licensed by whom?
Horror of horrors, the government, as part of its obligation to assure the existence of well-regulated (yes, the word has a number of interpretations). It’s privatization of gun control with the government stepping in only when the private sector fails.
What government?
Like most gun laws, particularly licensing and registration, this would likely function best administratively at the state level but, if out of state guns are a big problem, then it could be federal.
Why "single-shot bolt action" rifles? Bolt action is designed to work with a magazine, there are lots of single-shot designs that aren't bolt action.
And you need some policy for shotguns, which are both the most common hunting gun and extremely deadly at close range.
>>There are lots of single-shot designs that aren't bolt action.>>
Are there? I've never used a single-shot that wasn't bolt-action, unless you're talking about like literal muzzle-loaders (or maybe breech-loaded break-action like a shotgun).
At any rate, I think the load-bearing part was "single shot" rather than the action.
The .22 I learned with was a sort of lever that you swung away from the stock and back.
But mostly just harder to use than a bolt.
Yes, that's a classic falling-block design.
Single-shot or magazine-fed, though? I thought lever-action was typically for magazines.
ETA: I think SamChevre's comment clarified this for me.
I was thinking of all the late-1800's falling/rolling block designs.
I just copied and pasted that quickly from Matt's article. By all means add in the common hunting gun.
Where do all the illegal handguns come from in the first place?
Crime.
What about the Israel politics moratorium!
Lol sometimes I think his business manager or someone must be pushing him to boost engagement. Matt clearly enjoys writing about stuff like… housing policy, trains, congressional infighting way more.
MY is also a better analyst of housing than he is of Israel.
It’s not even that my politics on Israel are that far off his. We both support a two state for two peoples solution. It’s just that his analysis of Israel Palestine is just not very good
Sometimes I cynically think “terrible Israel-Palestine analysis” is more of a feature than a bug. Vapid analysis might help him signal to other Democratic coalition members that he can sometimes be reasonable and doesn’t just want to troll them all the time.
But then I remember his other foreign policy takes… which more or less boil down to I <3 Obama.
If his takes ended at “I want to cut military aid to Israel” and “I want to the US to be less involved in the Middle East”, then maybe I’d see that. He clearly thinks that Israel is a good topic for moderate candidates to signal left on to help manage the progressives in the coalition.
But some of his takes like this one that “the conflict is intractable because Shas has religious objections to dividing Jerusalem” are so absurd that it’s has hard to even know where to start.
And I always thought that Obama was a good president despite his weak foreign policy (and not only about Israel).
Maybe you can explain something to me. Why do Israelis dislike Obama so much? It’s fairly remarkable how unpopular Obama is (or was) in Israel. I’ve heard several reasons.
1. Disagreed with JCOPA and wanted to maintain maximum pressure on Iran.
2. Netanyahu and others were open Republican Party supporters
3. Prefer semi-stable authoritarian dysfunctional Arab states to more democratic Islamist states enabled by the Arab spring.
4. Racism and an inability to conceive of a black American leader
It’s not only that Israel “disagreed” with the JCPOA, but Israel viewed it as a threat, because you were strengthening, conventionally, a country 10x bigger than Israel, sworn to Israel’s elimination and destruction and who funds terrorist organizations that attack Israel‘a citizens. Whether that was worth it for a 15 year pause on their nuclear program was a question. I have some sympathy to Obama’s position. But for Israelis it’s not an abstract disagreement, but a potential real threat (and that threat indeed played out, as we saw from the sophistication of the IRGC-funded and directed Houthis and Hezbollah in the past few years).
But Obama was trying to bring Iran into the family of nations, without insisting that they stop funding terror, without insisting that Iran stop calling for the death of Israel. In the aftermath, the Iranian regime put up a doomsday clock counting down the seconds till Israel‘s destruction (which is real, look it up).
Obama also was a lot less clear than his predecessor on the issue of Palestinian refugees. Clinton was very clear that the descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 would not be able to settle within the boundaries of Israel, but would in a separate Palestinian state or a third country. These “refugees” are not refugees by any international standards, and are only designated as such because Palestinians are the only people with a separate designated refugee agency that tries to keep the problem alive by never settling a single refugee, having refugee status pass indefinitely from father to children. Obama on the other hand was much more ambiguous on this issue.
Obama insisted on a settlement freeze, which Israel did do in 2010 to 2011. Israelis felt that he was pressuring them, without comparable pressure on Palestinians. And Obama never seemed to give the Israelis credit for doing the politically challenging settlement freeze that they did do.
The Obama administration also abstained rather than vetoing a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity.
I have to take my car in for a smog check every year. What if gun owners had to take their guns in for a not-stolen check every year?
The thing that Matt gestured towards that is the under discussed part of the gun control debate is that rules and regulations targeting law abiding gun owners just push them away from your coalition without doing much to stop violence.
Harsher penalties for gun crimes and more stop and frisk type laws seem like the more effective (albeit likely unpopular) approach.
I think a lot of anti-gun types don’t care about law abiding gun owners or think they are closet fascists or a menace who should be given no political space.
I think this is a big reason why the gun control movement keeps failing - everyone can see their goals go far beyond supposed “common sense” reforms and most of their ideas would have a big impact on lawful owners and very little impact on criminals and mass shootings.
What's funny (?) is I'm not sure the median gun-restrictionist voter necessarily feels that way. Unsurprisingly, the goals of the activists far, far overshoot (sorry) their base of nominal political support.
Speaking for myself, I don't really give a shit if you have a semiauto AR-15, even though it has a pistol grip and it's black and it looks scary.
Why is putting criminals in jail unpopular with Democrats?
I’m a Democrat, and I’m totally fine with putting criminals in jail.
The trip up usually hinges on what should be considered criminal, and whether who is deemed as criminals is done on an equal basis.
I mean, it's easy to get all philosophical about "what IS the true nature of crime, really?" but to a first approximation, it's not that difficult.
Anything that involves violence, or a credible threat of violence, should be a crime. Domestic violence? Crime. Holding up someone at gunpoint? Crime. Carjacking? Crime. Etc. etc. A step down from that, stealing or intentionally destroying property (e.g., arson) is a crime.
Needless to say (but I guess it has to be said nowadays, sigh) I want criminal suspects of *all* races/ethnic backgrounds to be treated equally.
You undercook fish? Believe it or not, crime. You overcook chicken, also crime.
A lot of it has to do with whether sketchy-to-nonexistent evidence plus police suspicion ought to equate to putting someone in jail as a criminal.
For one, stop and frisk is literally unconstitutional.
Did you understand my question? Would you care to answer it? As an aside, I agree "stop and frisk" without probable cause is unconstitutional. Putting criminals in jail is not unconstitutional. Why is it unpopular with Democrats?
If we could trust that police officers and the justice system were genuinely operating with probity and motivated only by a sincere desire to make the streets safe for law-abiding citizens, there would be more support for law enforcement. However, it’s clear that a significant proportion of supporters of a “tough on crime” politics are just looking for a way to keep people of color on their place, and don’t care about crime per se. Put another way, the “crime problem” they’re concerned with is black people in durags and sagging pants just walking around, not murder, rape, and theft, and if we brought down actual crime without doing something about the “thugs” we won’t have solved the problem.
That’s not to say that everyone who cares about crime thinks like this. But because for decades “I’m tough on crime” has been used as a dogwhistle to mean “I’ll put *those people* back in their place”, it’s very hard to for someone sincerely tough on crime to convey that they’re tough on crime for real and not for racism purposes. This poses no real problem for Republicans who genuinely want to do something about crime, but for Democrats, it makes anti crime politics costly to their political standing within the Democratic coalition.
Additionally because lack of trust in the police among communities of color is a real problem hindering effective law enforcement, someone sincere about solving crime as a policy problem will also want more police accountability. But police don’t like being held accountable, and so real police reform is often accompanied by wildcat work-to-rule labor actions by cops, where they slack off on doing their jobs. So the choice for Democrats wanting to address crime is to get tough on crime without police accountability and look racist, or get tough on crime with police accountability and look ineffectual.
And that’s just the problem for Democrats who actually care about crime and want to do something about it. There’s a chunk of the Democratic coalition—minuscule in statewide and national politics, but often having real juice in local politics—that agrees with the racists that putting people of color in their place is the purpose of law enforcement, but thinks that’s bad. A lot of the dysfunction around crime in cities around the country is because these people wield actual power.
Crushing police unions needs to be a bipartisan policy objective. But in our stupid populist horseshoe environment, both sides seem to want to give more labor protections to these groups.
Ok, so you are operating on the Critical Race Theory model. I'm not going to move your needle. Your entire reasoning process is built around cliches and what you think other people think, not evidence. Copious evidence supports that minority communities want policing and jail sentences for criminals--which is logical since the majority of crime victims are themselves minorities. Copious evidence--victim surveys--support that young, black males are over-represented in the criminal population.
Evidence. Not mind reading. Nonetheless, thank you for answering the question.
Reasonable articulable suspicion, not probable cause.
Ok, something short of probable cause. I don’t want random shake downs, but I do want criminals in jail. Will someone please answer the question?
What if kitchen owners had to take their vent filter in for an anchovy check every year?
There are over 100 million gun owners in this country now, and they would simply ignore the non-stolen check. Like they literally wouldn't do it.
Sorry to sound cranky but I get tired of explaining this over & over & over. 'Hey I have a great idea for gun control- we can require insurance/require licensing/require safe storage/require a not-stolen check/require whatever'. Etc. etc. etc. Virtually all of the existing gun owners in the country would simply ignore your law. What are you going to do about that? Send the military door-to-door to search people's homes for illegal guns? This is why it's an intractable problem
Trying to track all the existing guns is too difficult. But we can track new guns.
>What if gun owners had to take their guns in for a not-stolen check every year?<
Lots of things might work. Almost none of them could get through the double filter of Congress+federal courts. And even those that did would probably cost Democrats dearly. Just ain't worth it.
I'm the furthest thing from a 2nd Amendment zealot imaginable. If it were up to me we'd at minimum nationalize the Massachusetts approach. Bog standard, rich country gun regulations would save a lot of lives! But for various reasons the country can't/isn't ready for that.
Worth noting that Massachusetts, like all of the other blue states I'm aware of, eventually outlawed sales of *new* semi-automatic rifles. They didn't try to outlaw the existing ones that were already in possession. I personally know Massachusetts residents who legally own & possess AR-15s and AK-47s within the state (including a doctor)- they just bought them before the current ban, so they're grandfathered in. I've legally shot both of those rifles at a licensed indoor Massachusetts range run by cops! Food for thought as to how effective some bans are- even the bluest state doesn't dare make all of the old owners felons overnight
1. Getting rid of emission tests/smog checks would be very popular! Modeling a gun policy off an unpopular policy is a poor start.
2. Cars are constantly seen under normal circumstances. So you can't get away with an expired tag, they can check for expired emission test when you renew the tag, etc., and it can all be enforced with fines in line with minor traffic violations. None of this is true of guns. What should the penalty be for skipping the stolen check for 20 years, when the final answer is it wasn't stolen? A number big enough to encourage compliance is too big to match the crime.
And far worse: the possessor of a stolen gun just ... skips the check. It's the worst of both worlds, with paperwork for gun owners that doesn't even inconvenience criminals.
I don’t have to take my car in for a smog check.
If you don’t understand why Jon Ossoff may one day be president and JB Pritzker definitely will not, all your politics-reading might be a waste.
It’s the corpulence, isn’t it?
I think you should check out who the current president is sometime.
He’s 6 foot 3 and 215 per his physician. That’s not bad for a guy his age assuming you believe it.
Why would anyone with eyes believe that? For that matter, why would anyone we even a glancing familiar with Donald Trump’s whole deal believe that?
I'm six foot nothing and 220 and I run 30 miles a week. DJT at 6'3/215 is an objectively hilarious statement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_Has_No_Balls
A similar work about Pritzker would be a crime against humanity.
You should probably do something about how hateful you are toward fat people. It’s really unbecoming.
I don’t hate anyone. Pritzker is a bully with really, really bad ideas. But I don’t hate him, no matter how unsightly he is.
You quite clearly do. You can scarcely speak of him without talking about his weight.
Pritzker is obviously taking Ozempic
(1) Stronger gun regulations would make Americans safer.
(2) There's virtually no prospect of doing this on a national scale in the foreseeable future, so Democrats shouldn't waste political capital on such a project. Indeed, it's not just a waste of finite political capital in the classic sense (as would be the case with, say, doing healthcare reform, or increasing revenue). It really hurts you with large numbers of voters in states you absolutely have to do better in to save the country from its current, incredibly depressing trajectory.
(3) And in any event we're already seeing a genuinely spectacular drop in gun crime, so...
We have plenty of unenforced gun laws. More regulation is not needed, enforcement is.
More and/or different kinds of firearms regulation are definitely needed if we want to bring down gun crime and intentional homicide. Just look at the rest of the rich world. Are you seriously contending Germany and Canada have found secret ways to enforce gun regulations they won't share with us?
We can't have a bog standard rich world system of gun laws because of politics (and yes, our current, ludicrously erroneous 2nd Amendment jurisprudence is downstream of politics).
Incidentally, both of the countries I cite above enjoy widespread firearms ownership and robust hunting cultures: being sensible wrt firearms regulation need not equate to gun grabbing!