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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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.
"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 fairy 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the 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.
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.
"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.
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.
“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.
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.
>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.
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.
The assault weapon and the street crime handgun are such different problems is almos surizing they are discusses together.
Isn't the emotinal force behind regulation to make either kind of weapon more difficult to abuse the Idea that the "real" objective is to ban confiscte all guns, an idea? Are there THAT many people who want to own weapons that fire large numbers of bullets in a few seconds or who would feel really inconveninced by a hanfgun tracking sysetm?
Politiclly, I think this have to be subsumed under the objective of cost effective crime deterrance through all the usuall suspects: more cops on the street, more certain arreast and prosecution for crimes, breaking up the unfrastuture of resale of stolen property and gun aquisition by criminals of whihc it is not the most important part.
"Are there THAT many people who want to own weapons that fire large numbers of bullets in a few seconds or who would feel really inconveninced by a hanfgun tracking sysetm?"
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 don’t think religion is a big factor on the Palestinian side. Hamas was only founded in the 80s after the conflict had been going on for 40 years. I’ve been to Bethlehem and saw the Church of the Nativity which the local Muslims have kept up, people had grievances like we can’t travel, are very poor, have nothing to do, live in fear, don’t know what our next meal is, etc. Didn’t hear anything about religion. None of the graffiti on their side of the Wall was about religion either; it was mostly doves and such.
People might understandably turn to religion after being oppressed for a long time. But the Middle East was relatively secular for a long time—secular nationalists ran most of these places in the immediate wake of decolonization and they only turned to extreme Islam later. And the richer parts of the Arab world like the Gulf States do not practice extreme Islam—Qatar has a higher Christian share than Israel.
[figures like Sneako and Andrew Tate are transparently selfish and immoral in a way that almost puts their ideas beyond debate]
Perhaps the philosophy needed to counter them is stuff about why it's important to be decent and honorable and not act out of selfishness and care about others and that sort of thing. Debate the part where they are selfish and amoral.
The opposition doesn’t believe in honor! And generally hates masculinity as a construct.
I’m painting with a broad brush here and people who say “liberals hate boys and manhood” are being a little extreme, but anyone who tries to reclaim a positive masculinity on the left will run into the fact that many, many people believe that masculinity is inherently toxic. It’s the same with religion and a lot of other broadly conservative coded things.
It might just be negative polarization but it stops “men and boys” orgs dead in the water.
I'm disappointed in how short the no fly zone answer was. I think it's *correct*, so far as it goes, but it doesn't have a resolution. And if McCain does win, which I think is very plausible, then that's putting in a pretty hawkish guy that might be doing his own fair share of bombing in the Middle East. I'm also curious if the no fly zones were up whether it makes it more or less likely Saddam could hold power through the Arab Spring.
My really Galaxy Brained take is that the Clinton Administration actually was already ramping up a possible war with Iraq and despite Gore's (quite admirable) opposition to what the Bush administration did, if he had been elected he would have given in to the Albrights and Bergers and Kenneth Pollacks and Josh Marshalls and invaded Iraq.
Entirely feasible. There's a lot of hatred about the actual Iraq War, and I certainly held it in real time, but we were already deep in there with the sanctions and no fly zones, and how that would get resolved is a very important question.
As we saw with the actual Iraq War, and Afghanistan, and Vietnam, there's massive sunk cost fallacy problems with how American policymakers see their war policies. Politicians HATE to be the person who pulls back or declares a loss. So they tend to escalate even when escalation is a terrible idea. (And related to that, for all my many problems with the Biden presidency, his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and to tell the hawks to stuff it is entirely commendable.)
I’m interested in what British readers think of the success of the Reform and Green parties. Let’s take foreign policy. If these are the two dominant political forces, then Britain would pull out of NATO and be broadly pro-Russian. They’d argue about China and the Middle East, but both parties are largely retrenchment focused or pro-authoritarian in foreign policy. Is this discussed at all in British politics?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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 fairy 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
What if kitchen owners had to take their vent filter in for an anchovy check every year?
>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.
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.
The assault weapon and the street crime handgun are such different problems is almos surizing they are discusses together.
Isn't the emotinal force behind regulation to make either kind of weapon more difficult to abuse the Idea that the "real" objective is to ban confiscte all guns, an idea? Are there THAT many people who want to own weapons that fire large numbers of bullets in a few seconds or who would feel really inconveninced by a hanfgun tracking sysetm?
Politiclly, I think this have to be subsumed under the objective of cost effective crime deterrance through all the usuall suspects: more cops on the street, more certain arreast and prosecution for crimes, breaking up the unfrastuture of resale of stolen property and gun aquisition by criminals of whihc it is not the most important part.
"Are there THAT many people who want to own weapons that fire large numbers of bullets in a few seconds or who would feel really inconveninced by a hanfgun tracking sysetm?"
Yes, and fix your keyboard.
“…weapons that fire large numbers of bullets in a few seconds…”
Define large.
Yes.
And suicide is a third very different problem.
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.
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.
Is Carolla a sexist? I know he's a Republican...
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 don’t think religion is a big factor on the Palestinian side. Hamas was only founded in the 80s after the conflict had been going on for 40 years. I’ve been to Bethlehem and saw the Church of the Nativity which the local Muslims have kept up, people had grievances like we can’t travel, are very poor, have nothing to do, live in fear, don’t know what our next meal is, etc. Didn’t hear anything about religion. None of the graffiti on their side of the Wall was about religion either; it was mostly doves and such.
People might understandably turn to religion after being oppressed for a long time. But the Middle East was relatively secular for a long time—secular nationalists ran most of these places in the immediate wake of decolonization and they only turned to extreme Islam later. And the richer parts of the Arab world like the Gulf States do not practice extreme Islam—Qatar has a higher Christian share than Israel.
[figures like Sneako and Andrew Tate are transparently selfish and immoral in a way that almost puts their ideas beyond debate]
Perhaps the philosophy needed to counter them is stuff about why it's important to be decent and honorable and not act out of selfishness and care about others and that sort of thing. Debate the part where they are selfish and amoral.
The opposition doesn’t believe in honor! And generally hates masculinity as a construct.
I’m painting with a broad brush here and people who say “liberals hate boys and manhood” are being a little extreme, but anyone who tries to reclaim a positive masculinity on the left will run into the fact that many, many people believe that masculinity is inherently toxic. It’s the same with religion and a lot of other broadly conservative coded things.
It might just be negative polarization but it stops “men and boys” orgs dead in the water.
I'm disappointed in how short the no fly zone answer was. I think it's *correct*, so far as it goes, but it doesn't have a resolution. And if McCain does win, which I think is very plausible, then that's putting in a pretty hawkish guy that might be doing his own fair share of bombing in the Middle East. I'm also curious if the no fly zones were up whether it makes it more or less likely Saddam could hold power through the Arab Spring.
My really Galaxy Brained take is that the Clinton Administration actually was already ramping up a possible war with Iraq and despite Gore's (quite admirable) opposition to what the Bush administration did, if he had been elected he would have given in to the Albrights and Bergers and Kenneth Pollacks and Josh Marshalls and invaded Iraq.
Entirely feasible. There's a lot of hatred about the actual Iraq War, and I certainly held it in real time, but we were already deep in there with the sanctions and no fly zones, and how that would get resolved is a very important question.
As we saw with the actual Iraq War, and Afghanistan, and Vietnam, there's massive sunk cost fallacy problems with how American policymakers see their war policies. Politicians HATE to be the person who pulls back or declares a loss. So they tend to escalate even when escalation is a terrible idea. (And related to that, for all my many problems with the Biden presidency, his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and to tell the hawks to stuff it is entirely commendable.)
I’m interested in what British readers think of the success of the Reform and Green parties. Let’s take foreign policy. If these are the two dominant political forces, then Britain would pull out of NATO and be broadly pro-Russian. They’d argue about China and the Middle East, but both parties are largely retrenchment focused or pro-authoritarian in foreign policy. Is this discussed at all in British politics?