Suffer the Little Children: our Christmas story.

Six years ago, an act of unspeakable horror occurred, when elementary school children in Sandy Hook Connecticut were massacred by a man with a gun--a legally purchased gun.

Oh, there were the "thoughts and prayers", the public hand-wringing, and everyone hoped that THIS TIME it would be different, that THIS TIME we (Congress) would do something to limit the access to lethal weapons like every other civilized Western democracy, but of course, there was no change.  The NRA and the gun fetishists saw to that.

And in a further sign of cultural depravity, the families of the murder victims continue to be harassed, pursued, and threatened by conspiracy theorists convinced it was all fake .  (In fact today, the 6th anniversary, the New Sandy Hook School received a bomb threat).

A tweeter  captured the new reality.  "Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over."

Sadly, we have decided that killing children is all right.  And with every step, it gets worse.

A migrant family is suing the US government (particularly ICE) for neglect of their child, who died of a respiratory infection contracted, and allegedly not properly treated, while she was in custody of ICE.  She was separated from her parents, taken to detention a healthy child, released as a sick one and dead within weeks.

The toddler’s death is not an isolated incident. Human Rights Watch obtained medical records for 52 detainees who died under ICE custody since 2010, and its experts concluded that nearly half of those deaths were linked to inadequate medical care.

In a separate case, we just found out that a 7 year old child died of dehydration last week hours after the migrant group she was with turned themselves in to the Border Patrol .

According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody at around 10 p.m. on Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in. 

More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders who arrived soon after measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”
....
Food and water are typically provided to migrants in Border Patrol custody, and it wasn’t immediately clear Thursday if the girl received provisions and a medical exam during the middle of the night, prior to the onset of seizures.

Let that sink in for a moment.  It's not clear that CBP treated this child, fed her, or gave her water, for hours after they took her in.

This is not the first time that abusive conditions have been reported for migrant women and children detained by CBP and ICE.

Writing in the Atlantic, Adam Serwer makes a case that this cruelty is the point.  In a searing essay, he writes,

It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds [Trump's] most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

This didn't start with Trump, of course.  Our current era has only exposed the hypocrisy, sadism,  and cruelty that have always simmered beneath the surface. Our American history is one of cruelty.  Manzanar, Jim Crow lynchings, the Trail of Tears, slavery.... to be American is to be bound into cruelty against the weak, the different, the other. 

Only now, we don't even pretend to exempt children, or care about them.  Talk about depravity. 

And here we are in a Christmas season, and our predominantly Christian country purports to celebrate the birth of a poor child, a refugee, born to save the world.    The modern day version of the story would be José and Maria, as in this compelling image by Everett Patterson .

Jose y Maria :  http://www.everettpatterson.com/?p=1835

How many Christians will lift their voices in song next week, thinking of Baby Jeezus!  when Jesus, José and Maria are suffering right here?  How many Christians will purport to be "pro life" as desperate families seek legal asylum and their children are taken from them and allowed to die?

Apparently to a large swath of Americans, there is not cognitive dissonance in this contrast.  It's okay. The cruelty is the point.

And that is our American Christmas story.

Pause to remember

Let us remember the African American victims of the shooting in Charleston a year ago, and the LGBT victims at Pulse this last weekend, targeted for who they were.

And let us remember all the other victims and come together in one human family to mourn, and to love.

Wearing orange against gun violence, after UCLA

Today and Sunday, the Bishops Against Gun Violence ask us to join the Wear Orange movement to protest gun violence. I have dutifully donned an orange sweater.

This is particularly striking in the aftermath of the events in Los Angeles yesterday, where by all accounts an engineering professor at UCLA was murdered, apparently by a former student who then shot himself.

Some of you may know that I am an academic.  My wife was unnerved, and asked, when I have office hours, can I see who is there?  I explained that the door is open for drop in office hours.  If a student makes an appointment, they may have to knock.   I'm not going to treat my students like a threat, even though it crosses my mind occasionally that a student angry about a grade, or about an honor infraction, could mean harm.  A bad grade or  honor infraction can impact whether someone gets into graduate or professional school, and thus have lasting effects.

I've only once been really nervous, years ago in a previous job, when an student seemed agitated when he wanted an appointment.  I stationed a very large graduate student at a desk just outside my office Just In Case.  It was unnecessary.  The agitated student was fine;  he just needed someone to give him some time and listen with sympathy to his concerns.  (Sometimes teaching is really more like therapy.)  If someone means to do ill, of course, the office door is no barrier.

The Bishops ask for very little, mainly increased background checks.  Most Americans (on the order of 85%) support the idea that there should be background checks for guns.  After all, guns are lethal weapons the purpose of which is to kill.

As one pro-gun legislator put it,

I am hard pressed to believe that the values of safe use and personal accountability that underscore responsible gun ownership are incompatible with our expectations surrounding access to firearms. This isn’t about gun control. It’s about promoting shared values that defend our right to be safe from the often tragic and irrevocable outcomes that spring from the use of firearms by people who, by any measure of common sense, should never had been provided access to firearms in the first place.

It also seems unfathomable to me that we have a huge rate of small children getting their hands on guns and shooting themselves or others.

By the end of 2015, about 265 children under 18 picked up a firearm and shot someone by accident, and 83 of those shootings were fatal, according to research compiled by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Some 41 of those deaths involved the shooters themselves, and most of the shootings involved toddlers or teens who were playing recklessly with the guns. (Source)

This is treated like some sort of acceptable collateral damage by gun advocates.   Horrifyingly, the NRA this week advocated keeping loaded guns in children's rooms, because of some paranoia about home invasion.  But,

...the threat of a violent home invader is far less likely than Pincus claims. Not only is the national rate of household burglary decreasing steadily, but so is the rate of violent crime during a home invasion. Less than one percent of homicides in the U.S. occur during a home invasion, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report from 2010, the most recent year the issue was studied. The roughly 100 homicides per year that occur during household burglaries is far dwarfed by the number of shootings by kids who accidentally get their hands on firearms (not to mention the staggering number of unintentional shootings committed by adults every year).

So, this obsession with guns for protection far exceeds the reality of the danger.  You are much more likely to be shot by your child than by a robber.

I know gun enthusiasts and while it's not my thing, I don't want to take their guns away.  But sometimes they seem a little unhinged on the subject, advocating a free-for-all that is almost a fetish.  And they seem far too willing to accept our unreasonable level of gun violence as an acceptable price of their freedom.  Please, I'm open to your suggestions, gun enthusiasts.  What do you suggest?

I don't want someone to be shot by a toddler who gains access to a gun.

And I don't want some unhinged student able to walk into a gun store to buy a weapon to shoot me because I gave him a C.

  

The God of the Gun

Well, here we are, looking at yet another gun massacre committed by some disturbed young man who thinks that fame awaits his memory if he just kills people.

President Obama asked people to consider what we fear from terrorism, versus what we fear from guns.  CNN put this together to show the relative risk:

We apparently have no qualms about giving up our freedom and civil liberties to respond to terrorist threats.  But guns?  All we hear is SECOND AMENDMENT!!! SQUAWK!

Salon:  

Imagine you’re at a gun show, standing in line behind four guys: a recently released felon, a terrorist on the FBI’s terrorism watch list, a man convicted of beating his wife unconscious, and a guy muttering about “hearing voices” who has been legally designated mentally ill. 

Right now in many states, all four men could take their pick of sophisticated weapons, plunk down their cash, and stride out the door without looking back. 

Would that freak you out? Yeah, me, too. And we’re not alone: Ninety-two percent of Americans, including 85 percent of NRA members, agree that every gun sale should require a universal background check, no matter where you buy it.

Sure, some bad guys will still get guns.  But you know what?  It's generally not the bad guys walking into the university classrooms and slaughtering people.  And the fact that we can't fix all gun crimes with a modest policy doesn't mean we shouldn't fix what we can.

As one who makes a living in a university classroom, frankly the idea that a disturbed student or outsider could get a gun and "solve" his problem that way, is terrifying.

American exceptionalism isn't just because of guns, but a perfect storm of lax gun laws and other ills.  So we murder far more people than nearly any other country, and certainly far more than other developed western democracies.  From the WaPo:

As the Guardian put it, 

There is far more to both gun violence in general andmass shootings in particular than just guns. The absence of a universal healthcare has made the prison system the principal provider of mental healthcare in America. The mentally ill in the US are less likely to diagnosed, less likely to be treated and more likely to be criminalised than anywhere else in the western world. The presence of mass poverty, significant economic inequality and widespread racial segregation combine to produce desperation, resentment and fear.
Other countries have these problems to lesser or greater degrees. The difference is that no other country has these problems and then a huge stockpile of easily available weapons to virtually anybody who wants them. 

And so the requiem continues. A painful elegy for a nation careless enough to lose its innocence on a weekly basis, one which can expend extraordinary resources looking for water on Mars yet is apparently incapable of finding a way to keep its people safe in cinemas, colleges and churches.

There are sensible ways to restrict some access to guns without infringing on the rights of otherwise normal people who want have machines meant for killing:  limiting high-capacity magazines, for example, and more rigorous background checks.

But the conservative gun advocates are afraid that any sensible control of guns is the start of a slippery slope of gun confiscation.

How can it be that vast majorities of Americans, including gun owners, favor stricter background checks, and yet there’s not the political will to pass them?

Fear of government, apparently. And paranoia, if you think of it, is not a good fit with guns to begin with.

...focusing exclusively on the lobbying angle overlooks the very real fear and distrust with which many gun owners regard the government that drives much of the opposition to gun laws. Many of them simply don’t believe that enhanced background checks—or whatever other modest changes are proposed—are what they appear to be.

I have friends who are smart and sensible, but who are ardently opposed to any change in gun laws.  They seem to offer no solution to the massacres.  They don't like the solutions others offer, however modest, but they offer nothing themselves except more guns.

 I can only think that to them, Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech and Umpqua Community College are simply collateral damage, as they touch a handkerchief to their eye, and thank these children and young adults for their sacrifice to the God of the Gun.

74 school shootings?

This map was making the rounds last week, after the latest school shooting in Oregon in which one boy shot another before killing himself.

The statistics come from a site called Everytown, which has compiled a list of all the school shootings since Sandy Hook.

It didn't take long for conservative gun advocates to push back, arguing that there weren't 74 school shootings, but more like 15.  As CNN put it, 

CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Newtown or Oregon -- a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school. That works out to about one such shooting every five weeks, a startling figure in its own right. 

"See?" the gun nuts argued on facebook and in article comments.  "There were only 15.  You libs just make stuff up!"  Thus implying that the other cases were bogus fiction.

Well, no, gun nuts.  You just don't get it.

First of all, whether it's 1, 5, 15, or 74, that's far too many shootings.  You guys seem to think that's a justifiable number. REALLY?

Second, it's all in how you define "shootings".  You don't think that other events count as school shootings because they weren't a particular pattern.   But as Everytown puts it,

Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts. This includes assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings. 

They are describing "school shootings" as events where a gun was discharged in a school. NOT just the Newton-style crazed person invading with a gun, which is where CNN came up with 15.  As a parent, I'd say that regardless of the "style", a gun going off in a school is a Bad Thing.

One mother described it from the heart.  Her son was killed by gang violence in a school setting.  But somehow, to CNN and gun advocates, that's simply an accidental event.  They give gang violence a bye.  It's not a "school shooting".  She corrects them:

Whenever a gun is fired at school, parents are rightfully terrified. Students are rightfully terrified. Try explaining to a shocked and devastated community that the school shooting it's mourning is disqualified because the gun was fired as the result of a "personal argument." 

I suppose if your innocent son is shot by a gang member, it doesn't make the cut. Or if he was shot in an "accidental" shooting (how it's an accident that a gun wound up on school grounds to begin with is beyond me). Or if he pulled a gun out in a classroom and shot himself. Or if he got into a "personal argument" and was shot down in the type of mild playground fight that happens every day in schools, but turned deadly in that instance because a gun was present. 

Maybe I should be giving CNN credit because they've managed to do something Washington politicians could not. They've reduced the number of school shootings across the country. But their insistence that 59 school shootings -- which have killed 25 people and injured 40 others -- don't matter isn't much consolation to parents like me.
.... we can't address the violence if we don't even acknowledge these shootings exist.

So, gun advocates, you can pretend that the Libs were lying.  But we aren't.  We just consider "school shootings" to mean shootings that took place at school.  And there were at least 74. And  we think that's a bad thing, any time that children are at risk, whether they are the targets or collateral damage.

And you guys think that your "freedom" to carry a device, the only purpose of which is to kill,  outweighs that.  As David Adkins wrote in a vivid image, until we stop this,

the NRA will simply take our children, group by group, to its yearly Lottery because, after all, that's the way we've always done it. For freedom.

We really are speaking a fundamentally different language, the gun advocates and I.

The bloodthirsty lottery of guns

From David Atkins, writing at Hullabaloo on yesterday's mass killing at Santa Barbara :

The common denominator is the gun. It is always the gun, and it will always be the gun. We can try to fix the other social problems all we want--and we should. But until we fix the gun problem, we will continue to offer the lives of ourselves and our children on the altar of this insatiable, bloodthirsty Lord we euphemistically call the "gun rights movement." Year after year, month after month we will continue to propitiate this monster with our blood and tears until enough of us decide that we have had enough, overthrow its foul priests and sack the tainted officials corrupted by its bloodstained lucre. Until that day the NRA will simply take our children, group by group, to its yearly Lottery because, after all, that's the way we've always done it. For freedom.

Baptism by torture

By now, you've heard that Sarah Palin likens waterboarding to baptism for accused terrorists.

Baptism.

A sacrament.

Compared to torture.

Rob Dreher speaks out:

OK, stop. Not only is this woman, putatively a Christian, praising torture, but she is comparing it to a holy sacrament of the Christian faith. It’s disgusting — but even more disgusting, those NRA members, many of whom are no doubt Christians, cheered wildly for her.... 

If I thought that kind of hateful declaration and abuse of the Christian religion was what conservatism stood for, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a conservative. Some conservatives do stand for that. They’re wrong, and they should be called out on it — not because some liberal somewhere is going to be offended, but first and foremost because we Christians who identify as conservatives are appalled by it. 

Joe Carter:

For anyone to confess Christ as their savior and to compare one of the means of God's grace to a reprehensible act of torture is reprehensible. I hope members of Gov. Palin's local church will explain to her why her remarks denigrate the Christian faith. Such remarks bring shame on the Body of Christ and to our witness in the world. Even more shameful, however, is the fact that so many Christians would cheer her support of torture (and yes, waterboarding is torture).....

.... The truly Christian position is to never forget that evil comes not just from the actions of "terrorists" or "enemies" but from the heart of a fallen, sacred yet degraded, human beings. If we are to preserve our own humanity we must not forget that our enemy differs from us in degree, not in kind. Like us, our enemies need to accept Jesus and to be baptized by water and the Spirit. That is the Christian way, not as Palin would have it, to have our enemies fear a pagan god and have their spirit broken by water.

Andrew Sullivan looks at what drives "Christian" outrage:

It seems to me, moreover, that torture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

On guns and cowardice; the failure of the US Senate

The bipartisan gun control bill, with its minimal constraints and requirement for background checks, fell short in the Senate yesterday. Oh, a majority of senators supported it. But they weren't allowed to vote on it, because of the complex Senate procedures and the filibuster, which allows a minority to control that chamber. Essentially, every vote requires a super-majority now-- a point worth making and remaking, as our dysfunctional government grinds so many of us to pieces.

 This refusal to compromise is thanks to the Republicans, which is why the Senate is impotent and unable to govern. As it happens, several craven Democrats also refused to support the call to end debate. There's enough ignominy to go around.

This, despite the fact that a strong majority of Americans think there should be background checks.  But the NRA thinks that the mentally ill and the criminal should have a right to guns.  (It also thinks that explosives, such as those used in the Boston bombing, should be chemically anonymous.  Because the right to bear arms apparently includes the right to anonymously blow up children and other civilians.)

From Spydersden

 Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who is the minority leader, gloated at the failure. Gloated at the faces of parents and families of gun victims. Laughed at them. (McConnell is the one on the right. Toby Turtle is the one on the left.  I'd rather have the Turtle in the Senate.)

President Obama blasted the lies of the gun-worshippers, who invoke black helicopters and death panels and (gasp!) National Registries!  Even though none of that was in the bill.  And this worship of the 2nd amendment to carry guns, prevent licensing, is a fraud.

For well over two centuries the Supreme Court never decided that the Amendment granted a constitutional right to individuals to bear arms. The widely held notion that such a right existed was a myth fabricated by the NRA for its own self interest and for the corporate profits of gun manufacturers. This fabrication altered the mindset of most Americans to accept fictional Second Amendment rights that permitted the proliferation of all manner and kind of dangerous weapons. We became a gun culture run rampant. The gun manufacturers reaped enormous profits as gun sales soared. In 2011 industry wide gun sales were $4.3 billion.

It's all about profit, you see.  Money, from an industry that is based on killing people.

But the best response is a passionate op/ed in the NY Times from former AZ Representative Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head by a disturbed man who murdered several other people.

SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets.... 

.. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending. 

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on. 

...They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing. 

They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest.... 

This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list. 

A meditation on violence, death, and loss

This Lent has seen too many friends and friends-of-friends die, as reported by James at TTLS, MadPriest, Lisa, and others. While some of these have been the passing of the old, there have been more than a few losses of young folks in their prime.

Tragic as any death may be, there has also been a spate of violent deaths that gives me pause. Counterlight reflects on the run of gun violence in the US with over 30 people killed in mass shootings of one form or another over the last week, some of them children. The reason for it is unclear (in at least two cases the killer himself died.)

And, in an example of how fundamentalism can contribute to violence, News from Iraq

Two gay men were killed in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a local official said on Saturday, and police said they had found the bodies of four more after clerics urged a crackdown on a perceived spread of homosexuality.....

Sermons condemning homosexuality were read at the last two Friday prayer gatherings in Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad slum of some 2 million people.

Too many deaths. And in the comments to this post, Ann tells us of Aaron, a young man savagely beaten in Denver for the sin of being gay and hanging by a thread; let us hope that he does not add to this number.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, wrote Dr Donne, and on this day, I feel diminished, and so very, very tired of the antagonism and the battles and the arguments that pass for discourse and cheap points scored at the cost of another. I am longing for some peace and security, with a fleeting hope that we can find what unites us, rather than constantly dividing into the "Us" and "Them". Gay vs Straight. Blue vs Red. Christian vs. Atheist.

Instead, I feel much the same grimness expressed by Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach . This poem is speaking to me these days far too much, with the noise and stink of those armies far too close.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.