Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who rarely disappoints those entertained by public displays of ignorance and disjointed thinking, offered a classic example of his talents today in a piece evidently cobbled together from the current obsessions of fringe-right radio. Globe:
With a little bad luck, anyone could find himself added to these terror watchlists run amok. To propose making rosters so sloppy the basis of draconian new limitations on a core constitutional right isn’t “common sense” gun control, merely cynical grandstanding.
There is no constitutional right for homicidal maniacs, terrorist suspects, lunatics, assassins, and other dangerous persons to have arms. It is not cynical to adopt measures that may protect innocent people from being murdered.
Meanwhile, HD 4331, which will make it harder for the terrorism suspects for whom Jacoby has such tender concern to acquire weapons in Massachusetts, advances with 42 co-sponsors. Perhaps it should be widened to include Globe columnists.
Here’s some facts
1)This list hasnt stopped any terrorist attacks
The shoe bomber and the thwarted Christmas bombers were not on the no fly list
2) None of the mass shooters were on the no fly list
I really question the efficacy of this new policy in stopping any mass shootings.
3) Hundreds of innocent people are on this list
The ACLU has said this list required massive reform, have been suing the agency for 10 years and only recently got it to release the list and its methodology which a Clinton appointee appeals judge called “appalling” and “a massive infringement on our sacred rights” to travel and have our privacy protected. That suit is still ongoing since the agency still refuses to create a process for people to get their names off the list. Lives and occupations have been ruined already over this list, let’s not add any more until we fix its defects and force transparency.
A broken clock is right twice a day, it is shameful there were a paucity of conservative voices attacking the Patriot Act, no fly list, TSA, DHS and other expensive, intrusive, and ineffective expansions of government during the Bush administration. It is shameful to see so many progressives arguing to maintain these policies today simply because Republicans now hypocritically oppose them. David and Tom were right to call state police security at the hunt and military arms for colleges as window dressing that don’t make us safer and potentially make us less safer. Nobody wants stricter gun controls more than I do, this policy does nothing to advance them while doing much to make permanent the erosion of civil liberties due to our overreaction to 9/11. Now with bipartisan enablement.
It sounds like you have some reasonable points. This, however, is a separate discussion about reducing weapons that threaten the public peace.
It is “about reducing weapons that threaten the public peace” only to the extent that it singles out specific people based on their inclusion on an arbitrary, bullshit list. This is pretend gun regulation– an attempt to introduce a rule that will accomplish nothing but allow some political posturing, without actually taking the issue on directly, because that would be just to hard.
Worse, it legitimizes this arbitrary, bullshit list. Hitherto, the political left was opposed to “Patriot Act” police state security theater, because of its gross trespass upon civil liberties. But I suppose one can jettison that position, if so doing permits one to adopt a gun regulation that will have no impact of any kind on gun violence, and thus to be able to pretend to have accomplished something.
Well put CMD.
And seems like a good companion to his equally reasonable piece arguing that the TSA should be abolished. He may be against greater gun controls using tired GOP talking points in other pieces, but he isn’t relying on those arguments here. It is fundamentally unfair to argue that those who question the efficacy or constitutionality of this list support arming terrorists. We don’t.
Does that summarize the argument?
N/T
But the no-fly list is bad medicine.
I’d rather freeze all gun sales, as a temporary measure. There is precedent for similar emergency measures, like the Bank Holiday of 1933.
But we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
The ACLU has compelling evidence that hundreds of innocent people, many of them Muslim Americans, have been profiled and misidentified do to this list. How many of these folks are actively pursuing terrorist plots and aims? How many mass shooters or successfully prosecuted terrorists have been on this list?
I guess that is my question here. I am all for doing something to get the ball rolling. Background checks, assault weapons bans, I would vote for all of those knowing full well they wouldn’t stop a single gun death in America, simply because they move the ball forward. But this list sets us backward on so many other fronts without really advancing us on gun control that it hardly seems worth it to me. I would be interested to hear you make your case beyond the ‘you’re with me or your with the Republicans who arm terrorists’ talking points you keep coming back to.
we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the feel-good
I’d rather freeze all gun sales too. But who controls the House and Supreme Court? And yes, there have been problems with the no-fly list particularly when Republicans are in charge of it. (They are so frightened of liberals that they can easily think of a liberal as a kind of terrorist.) One problem with the no-fly list certainly is that it lacks transparency — and maybe that lack of transparency is even necessary.
Nonetheless, achieving any kind of gun restriction at all in this day and age would be a huge achievement. As this proposal has a sort of self-evident logic, it has a chance of passing.
That wedge provided by its passing could give us much needed leverage for achieving other reasonable gun restrictions.
Do it. Whatever. I’m for it. ANYTHING. I’m for it.
One note about the politics, though. The President may be pursuing the cram-down strategy you’re suggesting, but I’m not convinced the Dem caucus in the Senate is. They took the vote last week knowing it would fail.
I’d love to be wrong, but I think Schumer was looking to embarrass the GOP and leave it at that. Let’s see what happens now.
…could also convince the GOP to join us and address concerns about the list itself.
If you’re a reality based progressive you should actually look into the due process issues, failure rates, and gross wastes of power and money that have been associated with both agencies. Not to mention persistent accusations of racial profiling against Muslims. Progressive shouldn’t be in the business of defending Bear Patrols.
but the horse race. 100% horse race posturing.
It’s why I am deeply disappointed that actual efforts that would save lives now, that aren’t opposed by the NRA, are being completely ignored. Because the inner city black vote is in the bag, and soccer moms in Ohio who are far less statistically likely to die from a gun homicide, will vote out Rob Portman and the GOP nominee because some ad told them they voted to let ‘known terrorists on a secret list’ buy guns.
N/T
Sorry, 1 and 2 are just plain dumb. Unless you know the inner workings of the FBI and CIA. There are those with links to to terrorist organizations on the list. If you want to make the case to tighten the list, then I agree. If you’re saying the list is ineffective you are out of your mind.
Elton Simpson had no problems buying guns. Hasan, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. I think there is a lengthy list of individuals who are being investigate d by teh FBI for terrorist activities, that maybe you know, not be allowed to walk into Guns Galore and buy automatic assault rifles, but that’s just me.
We’ve talked about this down-thread. There lots of lengthy lists of individuals being “investigated” by all sorts of nefarious and awful activities.
Nearly all of those individuals are just as innocent as you or me (I make a presumption of innocence on your part that I hope you find acceptable). We live in a culture that has been premised on “innocent until proven guilty” for a very long time — a premise that was hard-fought and motivated by VERY REAL abuses by insecure and frightened authorities and people.
Maybe you think that it’s ok for the government to arbitrarily deny rights, privileges, and basic constitutional protections (I do NOT include gun ownership in that list) to anyone they choose based on secret criteria that only they know (perhaps including provocative behavior such as marching in a demonstration, walking in a white neighborhood while black, or supporting the the other guy in the last election for the local elected judge).
I do not.
I usually find much to agree with here, but like Bob Neer, whom I also normally agree with, you resort to name calling rather than engaging with the substance of my objections and the objections of several civil libertarian organizations and liberal legal scholars that I cited. None of you I would imagine, have actually bothered to read the pieces I linked to or quoted from.
On my first point, I would argue it would be uninformed to presume that the government is more right than it is wrong when it comes to whom is on these lists. As I made it painfully clear, it may have stopped many attacks, I have no way of knowing, neither do you, neither does the President in every circumstance since that’s how secretive and opaque this list is. It’s efficacy can’t be proven or disproven since the dataset to even evaluate it is not only unavailable to the public, they refused to turn it over to Congress when Ted Kennedy asked after it and they refuse to turn it over now to the ACLU despite a judge ordering them to do so.
If we have no means of objective evaluating the program, it is hard to see how we can justify that it’s a success and suddenly demand expanding it’s read and broadening it’s authority to encompass a larger number of American citizens.
On point 2, that is verifiable. None of these mass shooters in the last four years since Sandy Hook were on the no flight list. Er go, Bob Neer or Lori Ehrlich or anyone in Congress or even the President arguing ‘this will help us stop San Bernadino’ is not being honest. Because it wouldn’t have, since they weren’t on the list. It is highly unlikely the next terrorist or mass shooter will be on the list either. As Paul Waldman pointed out, you would’ve had to severely undermine their constitutional rights and engage in a perverse form of racial profiling to even start to suspect these people. They were that good at covering their tracks.
As for point no 3, we have court orders proving that hundreds of innocent people were on the list, a deposition regarding a separate terror databank that included over a million American citizens with a tested 40% failure rate of misidentified citizens. That’s a major error, and should be a major cause for concern.
When the narrative right now is Muslims are evil, ban them, ID them, intern them, we are contributing to it by supporting this list, which thus far, has been used to commit massive amounts of racial profiling against Muslim Americans. No Democrat proposed this list when Dear shot up a clinic or Lanza killed those kids, but suddenly, the list is being exploited when it’s Muslim Americans doing the slaughter.
All terrorists should be disarmed. This bill will cause more problems than it solves, unless we substantially reform the list first and allow for greater oversight and transparency as the ACLU requested. They even would endorse this bill after that, and I would follow their lead. I am no Ted Cruz opposed to disarming terrorists as a matter of principle, but I am saying this list is ineffective and counter productive and feeds into Islamophobia will doing little on it’s own to reduce gun violence.
As far as I can tell, Jacoby’s argument is little more than “Obama is a doo-doo head,” and the fact of alignment with the ACLU is superficial, at best. I’m not sure I would go as far as Bob_Neer in accusing Jacoby of actively wanting to arm terrorists, but I don’t disagree that such would be an effect of Jacoby’s… erm… policy.
The ACLU argument seems to be put upon the slipshod methodology and potential for abuse not the mere existence of the list.
This is not a statement you can make since you cannot know why a thing that didn’t happen didn’t happen. As odds go it’s a good chance that a plot to blow up an airliner was thwarted by the no-fly list. What you are apparently wishing the no-fly list could do is to aid in the arrest, trial and conviction of would-be terrorists. That is not the purpose of the no fly list, any more than the purpose of the painted lines on the highway is to arrest drunk drivers.
There is ample precedent to extend the no-fly list to a other habits of mind, including gun ownership. Consider, for example that we have a ‘no drive’ list, its kept at the DMV because driving a car, like flying in an airplane — and indeed unregulated gun ownership under any reading of the second amendment– is not a right. Police use a subset of the ‘no drive’ list as a corollary ‘no drinking’ list in a manner that, as far as I can see, is exactly analogous to the proposed extension of the no-fly list.
The actual and true saying is a STOPPED clock is right twice a day. A clock that is ‘broken‘ might be stopped or it might be spinning so fast that it is correct once every other minute… or slow to the point it never reflects ‘true’ time more than once a week.
I mostly agree with you, and want to note several quibbles.
The no-drive list is public information, uses well-publicized criteria, and can be adjusted by legislators whenever they choose. There is no mystery about whether or not an individual is on the no-drive list and a well-understood process for challenging that membership. These various “watch” lists are, to the contrary, secret. They are hidden from legislators and the public. I understand the assertions that people have an ability to appeal membership in the list, and I frankly don’t believe it. In fact, I strongly suspect it has more in common with the “remove me from this list” gambit used by spammers to confirm the authenticity of an email address — I suspect that one of the best ways to be placed ON at least one of those lists is to request removal from any of them.
BTW, I’m pretty sure that a twelve-hour clock with mechanical hands that moves at a rate different from some external reference will tell the “correct” time (as in tell the same time as the external reference) at least once per twelve hours — whether fast, stopped, or slow. I could be mistaken, I think it’s actually an interesting question and I’ve only had one cup of coffee this morning.
A stopped clock will be correct once every twelve hours…. A fast clock will be right at least once every twelve hours and a slow clock will be right once in more than twelve hours.
Think about a clock that loses one minute every day, both start at 12:00, since is slow after twelve hour it shows 11:59(being behind the true time for all 12 hours), another twelve it shows 11:58 (still behind the true time), it will take about a year before it shows the correct time again, by losing 720 minutes (number of minutes in a 12 hour period)
He’s not incorrect for individual movements: the hour hand will align with ‘true’ hour and the minute hand will align with ‘ true’ minute (and so on for second hand, etc) at least once over the course of any 12 hour reference period. But to tell the ‘correct’ time the hour and the minute hand have to both align with ‘true,’ or reference, time and, as you point out, this can’t happen often enough to satisfy the criteria.
I didn’t bring it up, however, to point out a particular timekeeping error on the part of any interlocutor here (I don’t see actually much usefull distinction between “stopped clock is correct twice daily” and ‘broken clock is correct occasionally” but to notice the difference between ‘broken’ and ‘stopped’. Jeff Jacoby is not using ‘broken’ thinking: he’s not reasoning with some faulty premise or using any logical conclusion referenced in error or which is pointing to null space. He’s simply using null space. He’s using ‘stopped’ thinking… which is just another way of saying he’s got a conclusion and all else refers to it.
This is an important point because it seems a marked characteristic of the conservative mind: many of them are still trying to convince you of the sheer power of the ‘neat-o’ ideas that blew their minds in the seventh grade. In this, if nothing else, Jacoby is exemplar. From Karl Rove to Grover Norquist, every living Bush, Ron and Rand Paul, Trump, Carson and (quite particularly) Ted Cruz the cycle of politics often returns to the stopped, and aging, ex-prodigy (even if onlyl in his own mind) and his once seeming earth-shattering ideas and they seem fit in that political space the way a stopped clock occasionally fits into the reality of happening space we call time.
What if it were a digital clock that “Stopped” working and shows no time at all?
… That’s not a clock. That’s a timepiece. The saying “A stopped clock is right twice daily” depends upon the relationship between the hands of a mechanical clock and reference time that is missing in a digital timepiece. That it’s called a clock is an accident of lazy English, which is sorta my point about stopped thinking.
Thanks for the demonstration.
Good pieces by Eric Posner and Cathy Gellis here. Their objections are fundamentally similar to the reasonable sentence you quoted from Jeff Jacoby.
You also left out this paragraph, substantiated by the ACLU’s lawsuit:
A 40% failure rate is pretty appalling, especially when compared to the 63% homicide drop that programs like Operation Ceasefire have achieved at modest cost without incurring violations to civil rights or triggering a futile fight with the gun lobby.
I have used your language in the past referring to mass shooters as terrorists and arguing the NRA has contributed to arming them. I still hold this opinion today, I fundamentally disagree with you and other progressives that the folks on this list are all terrorists and that we should be depriving them of their constitutional rights without due process. And I am completely unconvinced that this action would’ve done anything to stop any of the mass shooters we have had to deal with. The best way to beat ISIL at home is to strongly condemn the rampant Islamophobia lists like this explicitly encourage.
This is a classic exercise in Bayesian statistics. I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I’ll take a swing.
The dilemma here is that the construction of ANY such list requires a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. A “false positive” is when an innocent person is identified as a terrorist. A “false negative” is when a terrorist is identified as innocent.
What lay people simply do not comprehend is that no test can have both a zero false positive rate and a zero false negative rate. EVERY test has a failure rate, and every failure must be either false negative or false positive. So a test designer has to choose whether to bias the errors towards false negatives or towards false positives.
A test that is biased to minimize false negatives detects the guilty parties, and penalizes the innocent. A test that is biased to minimize false positives protects the innocent and allows the terrorists to get away. The overall error rate is reduced ONLY by increasing the sample size.
If the thing being tested for is very rare, and the false positive rate is larger than that, then the overwhelming majority of people on the resulting list will be innocent. Suppose we pick a number for the number of actual terrorists we think are hiding in America. For the sake of this exercise, I’ll use a frequently cited right-wing article that concludes that there are “22 to 35” “MOA compounds” in the US. Let’s say there are 100 members in each compound (I found no numbers cited in my admittedly brief search). So it sounds like this right-wing source warns of 3,500 Muslim terrorists hidden among us. Just to make the numbers interesting, let’s say that there are 2-3 other kinds of terrorists besides Muslim terrorists also hiding among us.
So let’s say there are 10,000 actual terrorists hiding among us.
The US Census Bureau reports the following about the US population in 2014:
Total population: 318,857,056
Persons under 18: 23.1%
Persons over 65: 14.5%
So the 2014 population of people between 18 and 65 in the US is about 62.4% of the base, or about 198,966,803 people. Lets call that 200,000,000 to make the math easier.
So the likelihood that an American between 18 and 65 is a terrorist is 10,000/200,000,000 — about 0.005 percent.
The figure for the size of the watchlist cited above is at least 1.5 million (the “40 percent” of “680,000” failures cited by the National Counterterrorism Center is not helpful because no information is provided about how their “680,000” person subset was selected). If the list were selected through simple random chance, the number of actual terrorists on that list is 0.00005 x 1,500,000, or 750. Since there are only 10,000 actual terrorists (using our earlier assumptions), there can’t be more than 10,000 actual terrorists on the list.
If there are only 10,000 actual terrorists in the population, and 1.5 million on the “watch list”, than there are 1.49 million innocents on the list.
So we know that we have 10,000 real terrorists and 1.49M false positives.
The bottom line? If “Joe Blow” is on the list, the odds are overwhelming against Joe being an actual bad guy.
I know that these numbers are off, we don’t have nearly enough information to get a handle on the actual statistics (which is itself a huge problem after fifteen years of history with such lists).
What we do know is that the primary effect of these lists is to harm innocent people.
…that rather than there being a few mistakes, that the list is so flawed that more innocent than guilty people are on it? I guess for me since I want fewer guns in circulation anyway I’m less upset that this will be denied to some people it shouldn’t be than I would be other rights and privileges.
If they were actually guilty of actual crimes, they would’ve been charged and brought into the police for questioning. None of these people have been to my knowledge, I could be wrong though, none of us will know since the list isn’t public, we have no idea what qualifies someone to get on the list and who does the qualification, and we have no idea how innocent people, hundreds of whom are wrongly on the list, can get off of the list. Arguing that all of the people on the list are guilty of terrorism is about as credible as arguing that all the names on the black list were guilty of communist subversion against the United States.
A more reliable proposal, in my view, is saying that ex-felons lose their gun rights. In far too many states they lose their right to job, housing, and the right to vote. I don’t see why we disallow those but maintain their right to access weapons when they have been charged with using them in the past to commit crimes. Let’s push that, and then we could use these very talking points against the GOP without endorsing a list the ACLU has spent a decade suing as a massive violation of our 4th amendment rights.
You, Bob, and other seem to think the agency in this list is a foolproof as the Dark Knight computer or having the same power as the PreCogs in Minority Report to predict every future crime and stop criminals from getting guns. A) it doesn’t and B) there would still be significant legal and ethical ramifications if it did.
The way to get guns out of circulation is to get guns out of circulation, the way to reduce gun violence is to use proven programs that reduce gun violence. I really don’t think codifying this problematic program that is in place to score a ‘win’ over the NRA is worth the price we pay by keeping this system in place instead of rolling it back along with all the other post-9/11 abuses.
…that there is at least a good faith effort based on reasonable suspicion to put problematic people on the list. I never said it was perfect, but I guess I still trust my country and government just enough to think that we would do everything in our power to get it right.
At one point the Maryland State Police were adding anyone they saw at an anti-war rally. As terrorists.
At the end of the Bush Administration there were 47,000 on the list. Now there are over 700,000. The rejection rate for additions is less than one percent.
But this isn’t about Democrats suddenly being concerned about terrorism. This is about two things.
First, make Republicans look bad. Preeminent as always.
Next, it is about halting gun sales. If there are 700,000 on the list, there will also be 2 or 3 others whose names will be similar enough to stop them from buying a gun on a database check. That will be MILLIONS of people who will be prevented from purchasing a gun. Like magic.
Almost as magical as the belief that criminals would only buy guns through a legal gun sale, because criminals choose to obey ONLY gun laws.
Indeed, I think this IS about halting gun sales — I agree with you about that.
I also agree with you that these lists are anti-American and violate everything we say we believe. In my view, our hysteria about these matters is a betrayal by BOTH parties.
There any number of steps we could take to discourage, rather than encourage, gun manufacturers and arms dealers from allowing their product to get into circulation among the underworld. We have little trouble finding ways to track motor vehicles used by criminals — we can do the same for weapons and ammunition if we ever choose to do so.
I don’t know where it fits on the list, but the GOP is making ITSELF look bad when it comes to flooding our society with guns — we don’t have to do anything but encourage people to notice. The GOP similarly makes itself look bad by flocking to support Donald Trump. Unless you belief the conspiracy theorists who speculate that Mr. Trump’s candidacy is actually part of secret conspiracy with Bill and Hillary Clinton to ensure the election of Hillary Clinton, the shameful rise of Mr. Trump is ENTIRELY due to the GOP’s own decades of demagoguery.
The best way to defend against the awful attempts of the Democrats to make the GOP “look bad” is stop looking bad.
Except the part about making Republicans look bad- they handle that all on their own.
It is a lever little wedge to put the GOP in an uncomfortable spot. Welcome to politics. Is it time for another “partial birth abortion” bill yet?
The only problem with what is otherwise a clever little gambit is that it capitulates outright to the intrusive Surveillance/Security/Police State.
Not sure about PP’s numbers, but I agree with the general notion.
The gun crisis is way too serious to waste time embarrassing Republicans. We need to talk about fixing it.
Do you guys know John Cornyn had a bill back in October? I’m surprised we didn’t hear more about that.
We aren’t talking about the “no-fly” list, we’re talking about “Terrorist Screening Database”.
We are talking about what it takes to get into that database, and what the implications are of being in that database — especially as an innocent. Just as illustrative example, if an innocent person’s fingerprints or DNA is in a government database, that person is INFINITELY more likely to be falsely accused of a crime based on fingerprint or DNA data. That’s because when authorities have fingerprint or DNA evidence from a crime scene, they compare their crime scene evidence with the contents of their database. Even if the chances of a match are very small, that match would be impossible if the person weren’t in the database. So anything short of a database with fingerprints and DNA of every person exposes the innocents that it does contain to false matches.
What we know that is that a database has ONE AND HALF MILLION people in it, and tiny fraction of those are actual terrorists (even 10,000 terrorists is a very small fraction of 1.5M. The fraction in the overall population is about a hundred times smaller).
A “terrorist screening database” with only 1.5M people, out of a population of 200M people, means that those “select” 1.5M people are FAR MORE LIKELY to be harassed by authorities than the general public.
We know that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the names in that database are innocents. The mere fact that someone is in that database greatly multiplies the likelihood of “attention” from authorities. So it means that the effect of this database is to greatly multiply the number of innocents (who are included because of secret criteria) who will be harassed (or worse) by authorities.
You frequently assert the importance of “innocent until proven guilty”. When and why did you abandon that principle?
Is that really the standard? That’s how I’m interpreting this – that we’re going with the fingerprints we already have and trying to force a match.
Fingerprint and DNA evidence is only helpful if it either matches or rules out someone.
When such evidence is found at a crime scene, it is matched against the relevant database. If a match is found against someone in the database, that person just got into BIG trouble.
The issue is false positives — false matches. There is always some chance (even if small) of a false positive. If a person (whether criminal or not) isn’t in the database, then there is ZERO chance of a match with that person.
I don’t know if matches are “forced”. I do know that the fact that the sample from which comparisons are made is MUCH smaller than the general population turns the statistics on their ear.
A perpetrator who is not in the database cannot be correctly matched. Any match that is found is therefore false. If the database contains, say, twenty percent of the actual criminals in the population, then 80% of the actual perpetrators are excluded because they aren’t in the database.
The math that controls statistics like this is deep and highly specialized, I’m certainly not conversant with it (but I bet stomv is … 🙂 ).
The point is that a list or database like this is NOT the panacea that many claim.
Bayesian statistics!
Was an attack on the 4th amendment, infringing on due process and NOBODY cared about it, left or right (except maybe politicians with the last name Paul) until guns got involved.
So…shame on us for not caring earlier.
Many of us in this community objected loudly to the premise of the no-fly list. Many of us opposed the last Democratic gubernatorial nominee because of her overly supportive view of such matters (including the even more objectionable Patriot Act).
I don’t feel that have anything to be ashamed about.
Ted Kennedy, who might be primaried today for ‘voting with the Tea Party to let terrorists on the no fly lists have guns’ was a strong critic of the list and used his own experience of getting misidentified to demand greater accountability and transparency to the shadowy billion dollar agency in charge of it. He also voted against the Department of Homeland Security and against the TSA along with Russ Finegold. I would be remiss to mention that for half that price we could reduce gun homicides by 63% in our inner cities without surrendering our 4th amendment rights to a shadow government or codifying racial profiling against Muslims into law. We would probably save more lives from gun crimes while we were at it too.
I don’t know how Kennedy would vote and neither do you, but he wouldn’t be primaried over it.
I am saying that Bob’s talking points at the start of this thread against Jacoby could easily be cross applied to the many Democrats and progressive activists who rightly opposed the no fly list when it was first introduced or requested that it be significantly reformed. Reforms the ACLU is still demanding as we speak before we adopt this program without a debate.
Now Jacoby, Ted Cruz, and all the other Republicans not named Paul can be rightly painted as hypocrites for falling over themselves to oppose this list when they made no objection to it before it fit into their ‘libruls takin’ er guns’ dichotomy. But we should strongly avoid the temptation to say after San Bernadino ‘damn right we’re coming for your guns!’ using this flawed mechanism as our means to achieve that end, however angry these events have made us.
This past week is the first time I’ve heard Democratic politicians propose using the ‘terror watch list’ as a gun control solution. I strongly feel the Muslim community could view this as a dog whistle concession to the fearmongering of the far right over this issue. I heard nothing about using no fly lists to stop ‘terrorists from getting guns’ when it was white male terrorists doing the shooting.
This is just one tool that may stop some gun purchases. Nobody is offering it was a panacea.
Wired had an article on this back five years ago. Why are the politicians still beating the drum after the parade has passed? Are soundbites stronger than reason?
“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.” ― Ben Goldacre
The terms Terror Watch List and No Fly List are being used interchangeably by proponents, even though they are different lists with different criteria, maintained by different agencies.
in this regard. In her recent post, she stated that consulting the terrorist watch and no-fly lists would be part of a 9-part background check in determining whether someone could acquire a gun in Massachusetts. She also stated in the post that the bill would simply prohibit people on the watch list from being able to acquire guns in Massachusetts. These two statements seem a bit contradictory.
I agree with the arguments made here that these lists are heavily flawed and that they are probably packed with innocent people. I’m not sure, though, that it can be said with any certainty that these lists haven’t been, or couldn’t be, used successfully to stop terror attacks. If the lists are among several factors consulted in authorizing gun sales, that would seem to make sense. That said, the process under which these lists are compiled certainly needs to be reviewed.
What I still find excessively hypocritical is the Republicans’ sudden concern for the lack of due process in compiling the lists. Even our governor wants to bar Syrian refugees from the state, whether they are on the watch list or not.
I fear you, like too many of our otherwise reasonable friends, are conflating two fallacious rackets — the “indulgences” racket, made famous at the Reformation, and the “protection” racket made famous by organized crime in the twentieth century — with a desire to “protect” our “security”.
We agree that these lists are “heavily flawed”. There is no “probably” about them being “packed with innocent people” — it is a statistical and mathematical certainty. Unless we believe that there are more than million terrorists hiding among us (see “protection” racket, above), then VIRTUALLY ALL the 1.5M people in the “terrorist screening database” are innocent.
Suppose, just for the sake of discussion, that our government compiled some other lists:
– A list of “suspected Jews”
– A list of “suspected Blacks”
– A list of “suspected homosexuals”
Now, suppose the government said that these last three lists were “among several factors consulted in authorizing gun sales”. Would it still make sense?
Here’s how the “indulgences” racket works. The scammer persuades you that you are at grave risk from an invisible, powerful, and capricious agent that ONLY the scammer knows how to influence. This agent is so powerful, and so fearful, that even the means to prove or disprove the relationship between those grave consequences and this invisible agent are not just secret, but blasphemous to even ask about. Having set up the racket, the scammer now explains that, in exchange for money “gifts” from you, he or she will put in a good word for you with the invisible agent. When you do that, and some bad things still happen, the scammer sadly explains that it wasn’t ENOUGH money, and that you must find a way to “give” more.
The “protection” racket is closely related. The scammer in the protection racket notifies you that terrible things have been happening in your neighborhood. The scammer explains that the gang, mob, or local vigilante organization that he or she is part of will protect you from these terrible things in exchange for a modest cash fee. Those prospects unwise enough to observe that they’ve had no trouble with those terrible things receives a simple one-word answer from the scammer: “Yet”.
We are the world’s largest exporter of weapons. One of the weapons used in the Paris episodes has been traced through a US arms dealer (they were apparently manufactured in the Czech Republic).
Our role as leading weapons supplier makes us a participant in a protection racket. I’m not saying that anyone in the US government or weapons industry encourages terror. I’m saying instead that we intentionally flood the world, including the world’s terrorist organizations, with arms and ammunition at great profit. Episodes like Paris and San Bernadino are great for business.
Our government’s approach to “terror”, especially these lists, is an application of the indulgences racket. The terror attacks are very real. The very expensive (in terms of rights, liberty, and freedoms lost) “security” measures have little or no relationship to what does or does not happen here.
When you observe that these lists “seem to make sense”, I ask you to please consider the PRICE we collectively pay for such lists. How many promising careers are ruined because someone is wrongly on one of these lists? How many families are wrecked because a loved one is unable to rejoin his or her family because of improper placement on this list?
Our constitutional protections were not put in place as academic exercises in philosophical rhetoric. In particular, our protections from search, our right to peaceably assemble, our right to freedom of speech (and of listening), and a host of others were put in place because of first-hand experience with out-of-control government authorities.
I think we need to examine the PRICE of stopping terror attacks very carefully.
point out that all lists are not the same in terms of their political ramifications. A list of suspected terrorists is not the same as a list of suspected Blacks or suspected Jews. A list of suspected terrorists is, in itself, not discriminatory or accusatory in regard to any particular group unless it is used that way.
I agree that compiling terror watch lists can be inherently dangerous from a human rights or democratic point of view, and it does come at a price. But the threat of terror is real even if our reactions to it have been wildly out of proportion in many cases. As I said, the processes under which the terror watch and no-fly lists are compiled should be thoroughly and publicly reviewed. There should be hearings in Congress on it.
We already have strong evidence that mere presence at an anti-war demonstration is enough to cause inclusion in the “Terrorist Screening Database”. That alone, in my view, leads me to the conclusion that the lists of “suspected terrorists” are, in fact, pretty much identical to the lists I offered. These “terrorist” lists ARE being used this way.
I have not argued that the threat of “terror” is not real. I have, instead, argued that our reaction to it is greatly exaggerated, to the point of hysteria, by forces (such as government and those who own the media) who intentionally strive to instill fear and hysteria among us. This conscious desire is WHY “1984” was written midway through the last century. George Orwell did not make up the plot of “1984” from whole cloth.
For several centuries, Americans encountered “terror” and valued our constitutional freedoms more highly than the resulting fear. People have been blowing up trains for as long as there have been trains. During the labor wars of the early 20th century, company owners locked the doors of union organizing halls and lit them afire — surely those were acts of terror.
It does little good to conduct hearings in Congress when a hysterical and panic-ridden populace demands that Congress “do something”. The public support for Donald Trump, especially among the GOP, does not suggest to me that hearings will help. If anything, such “hearings” would turn out be witch-hunts that have more in common with the most recent abuse from the “Benghazi” committee than anything else.
In my view, America needs to recover our basic values. We need to rediscover our courage — the moral courage that reminds us that our fundamental values, reflected in our Bill of Rights, are the core values of our culture.
What we are living through right now truly is “un-American”. The question at hand is whether America is willing to face and change that shameful reality.
The federal government has used the no fly list to pressure innocent Muslims to become informants, prominent Islamic community members have repeatedly found their names on the list, and the Obama Justice Department has argued that there is no constitutional right to refuse to become an informant in defending this tactic (seemingly forgetting the 5th amendment). It also refused to hand over the names on the list, which expanded 10 fold since Obama has become President.
No one talked about using a no fly list to disarm mass shooters until Muslim’s were the mass shooters. This is a dog whistle folks, at the very time we should be loudly opposing policies that erode our collective civil liberties and government policies that intentionally hold Muslim Americans to greater scrutiny than other citizens.
Is a phrase we should honestly ban from BMG discourse. It prevents us from really thinking independently and evaluating policies on their own merits and whether they meet with our own professed values. It contributes nothing to these kinds of conversations and doesn’t help us make more progressive policies or hold our own side accountable when it violates those values. It’s really tiresome and trite.
I can’t sign up for this.
There are any number of issues where today’s Republicans simply ARE worse. I agree that Mr. Obama has done some awful things about “terrorism”. I think it is a logical fallacy to correctly observe that each group has non-empty “tails” of a given opinion distribution and then say “both are the same” or the other conclusions you offer.
There is no Democratic party counterpart to Donald Trump. There are few Democratic voters clamoring to support his bigotry and hate-speech. There is no second-tier of Democratic candidates offering the same bigotry with lipstick to disguise the ugliest parts. The anti-Muslim prejudice happens in the context of a party that has beating the drums against immigrants for decades. The “birthers” are not a Democratic sect.
The plain fact is that Republicans candidates are FAR more eager to paint Muslims, immigrants, women, and blacks with the same very broad brush than most Democratic candidates. The impetus to hold the entire government hostage to demands the funding be cut off for Planned Parenthood comes from the GOP.
I think Democrats have been too reserved, too courteous, and too respectful of hate-mongering bigots dressed GOP costume for too long.
By and large, this line of questioning is used to shut down valid criticism of Democratic office holders or limit the diversity of acceptable progressive opinion on a given issue. Certainly on this question, where I think we have to concede that our gun control efforts have been a multi decade fight that have largely failed at succeeding in reducing gun deaths. Pointing that out doesn’t mean I am enabling the GOP or the NRA, it means I want us to have a nuanced discussion regarding under the radar policies we could be supporting that could work and might actually pass.
Or this entire argument about no fly lists, where Democrats are clearly overreacting to Muslim terrorism in a way they didn’t to white male terrorism by making the post-9/11 measures permanent as well as expanding them even further. Obama has been awful on these issues, even in ways where he could’ve made a big difference. It’s not Republican for me to say so, and pointing out that the choice this fall is between Hillary and Cruz doesn’t really illuminate the discussion. We can and should demand better than what we are getting without being cudgeled with the threat of a GOP President.
Locally we see this all the time in the discussions we have been having on how to oppose Baker, how to get rid of DeLeo, and how to pass actual progressive legislation of substance. You and I both know that last years contest for governor devolved into this ‘coakley is better than a republican’ was about her only selling point. It’s why you backed Falchuk, a candidate and movement I am far more excited about than anyone potentially running on our side right now to be completely honest.
I am demanding better of myself and trying to argue with the few Republicans here in a way that leads to common ground and understanding, while also accepting that there are many, many people in this state and over the country who feel left out and left behind by Democratic policies. Not all of them can be dismissed as racists or religious fanatics. Some of them may even have a point.
Policy interests me, team blue v. team red largely bores me.
I agree with your reasoning here. This is, I think, the “perfect being the enemy of the good” tactic performed so well by Bill Clinton.
At the same time, I insist on asserting limits to what I will accept from EITHER party.
I will not accept that I should remain silent about GOP hate speech and widespread support for that hate speech. I will not be silent while a political movement does all in its power to destroy the primary health care provider for tens of millions of American women. I will not be silent while a political movement does all in its power to shut down the government rather than fund affordable health care for all Americans.
I will not be silent while a political movement agitates to maintain lists of a people of a particular religious tradition and agitates to use those lists to, at least at first, bar entry to people on the list (who knows what this bigoted mob will next propose for people on said list).
I don’t care whether speaking out against such shameful regression to dark-ages thinking is politically advantageous or not. I think there MUST be limits on what we are silent about, and I think today’s GOP candidates, today’s self-identified GOP “likely voters” who support them, and today’s bought-and-paid for megaphones for such hate speech (like Fox News) need to be called out for what they are.
Like it or not, we ARE in fact, in the grips of our own culture war, if not Jihad. We ARE under attack from a cancer within us that repudiates science in favor of superstition, that repudiates logic and fact in favor of emotion and uninformed belief, that repudiates statistics in favor of carefully-chosen anecdote, that repudiates debate and discourse in favor of the tyranny of raw power.
This is a cancer that tells us that preventing a low-level government functionary from denying marriage licenses to legally qualified adults is an infringement of her right to practice her religion. That is sheer dark-ages hokum. This is a cancer that tells us that a political party whose senior spokesperson proudly announced their intent to DESTROY the Obama presidency at the dawn of that administration is not to blame when, six years later, SEVENTY PERCENT of Americans believe that congress is dysfunctional. Indeed, congress IS dysfunctional is dysfunctional because the GOP has spent virtually ALL of the last two Democratic administrations breaking it.
I agree with doing all we can to find common ground with unenrolled and red-leaning voters so that we accomplish the things that simply MUST be accomplished. I do not agree that we should betray our commitment to fact, rationality, science, or the existence of objective reality in order to accomplish that.
When an un-enrolled or red-leaning voter tells me that I am a “liberal” or a “leftist” because I rely on peer-reviewed science to form my opinion about climate change policy, I am unwilling to remain silent.
When a political party and its supporters conducts a decades-long scorched earth campaign against against me and my culture, I will not agree to say that I see no damage and I will not be silent about who I saw accomplish the destruction.
If the argument is, “Something HAS to be done, and NOW,” I wholeheartedly endorse that.
Because that is the situation. We’ve raised valid concerns, but they’ve been tossed aside for far lesser reasons in the past.
If something won’t actually help and codifies a bad policy we have already critiqued, and arguably makes it worse, how is this helping? It was dishonest and laughable for Jeb Bush to say “my brother kept us safe” when we all know these policies have made us less safe.
In a similar way, it’s dishonest for Gov. Malloy and President Obama to argue “in the wake of San Bernadino we have to pass this”. Well, they didn’t make that argument when white males were committing mass shootings-which we all agree here are terrorism no matter who pulls the trigger.
This is a policy its supporters are conceding is for optics to “do something” on gun violence, by codifying troubling trends in our government and making permanent programs and agencies that have a poor record of identifying real threats and respecting people’s rights.
Meanwhile, I’m in a south side old navy with my other half right now buying mittens, hats and scarves for kids orphaned by the endless gang violence in Chicago and nobody in either party gives a damn about getting guns off these streets, ending the drug war, reforming prisons, and reforming policing so these communities can be saved.
We are donating our time and these items since the organizations we are working with are critically underfunded and undermanned. For half the amount of money we are wasting on these lists we could be saving the lives of our forgotten fellow Americans.
I applaud your energy and commitment to helping the victims of our economy in your community.
I want to ask a question about old-fashioned church-sponsored “support groups”. My parish at the time joined with the “Greater Boston Interfaith Organization” (“GBIO”) to conduct “support groups for the unemployed”.
What those groups did was conduct workshops in resume writing, interviewing skills, and job-hunting strategies. They were operated like twelve-step groups, where each meeting began with a participant telling their personal story. At one level, they were a valuable and needed emergency response to desperate and urgent need.
There was a deeper level, though. What those groups also did was reinforce and strengthen the wage-slave mentality that creates the problem in the first place. They helped participants please their corporate overlords, rather than find ways to break out of the entire cycle. I noticed several aspects of the program that were, for me, glaring:
1. They did NOT make any attempt, AT ALL, to identify, change or pressure the employers in the community who created this suffering. In fact, they depended (both directly and indirectly) on those employers (or their executives) for funding through charitable contributions. Too many employers gave generously to GBIO, and proudly trumpeted that “charity” as an example of their commitment to improving the society around them. That did not create a culture, within GBIO, that welcomed observations about how those corporate sponsors actually treated their workforce.
2. These groups depended on their participants NOT breaking out of the cycle for their organizational success. A participant who FOUND a good job was no longer part of the group. There were no testimonials from workers who escaped the “plantation”. Like all such groups, these were measured on the basis of how many members they had and how effectively they increased their membership.
I join every compassionate person in wanting to do whatever I am able to alleviate obvious and immediate suffering. I participated in organizing and operating one chapter of the above (that’s how I know about its organizational structure and management metrics).
I stopped participating because, over the space of a year or so, I became convinced that these workshops were doing as much harm as good. We were, in my view, perpetuating, enabling, and expanding the very problem we existed to address. Significantly missing from our metrics was any measure of success at helping our “graduates” actually attain a sustainable sense of well-being, prosperity, and stability in the economy.
I enthusiastically agree that, like triage tents on a battlefield, programs like this are vital. My concern is that we lose sight of:
1. The need for actual hospitals that are NOT on a battlefield
2. The tendency to perpetuate the war so that those who are successful in operating the triage tents can continue their success.
The practices that make a triage tent work well are very different from the practices that make a hospital work well.
Somebody has to end the war, even while we effectively operate the triage tents.
I seldom agree with your solutions, but your insights into social and economic problems are always valid.
It focuses on five key areas to prevent and reduce gun violence, one of which is lobbying for better gun controls. This week the IL legislature will be taking up bills that ban ex offenders, certified mentally ill, and domestic abusers from purchasing guns. A much easier restriction to enforce fairly from a civil libertarian perspective, and CCC worked closely with the Rep who drafted it.
Gun control doesn’t pay for funerals, it doesn’t pay for education for survivors, it doesn’t pay for grief counseling and trauma care, and it doesn’t pay for interventions that have proven to reduce gang violence. I just want some of the money allocated for our expanding shadow government going to programs that work, strengthen rather than criminalize communities of color, and help the people who deal with this on a daily basis without any cameras or congressmen clamouring to care.