The Wrongologist

Here are
two tidbits left over from last week:

1. 1.   Debt Ceiling/Fiscal Cliff

The
Republicans argue that the debt limit is their only leverage to curb Mr.
Obama’s spending: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Fox News:

In
other words, the GOP will only support budgets that don’t add much, if anything
to the debt.

This
is demonstrably, laughably, even shockingly false. Why? Because it
would take about $6 Trillion over the next decade just to
accommodate the debt Republicans voted for when they passed Rep. Ryan’s budget
last year.

This
proves beyond question that the debt ceiling clash has nothing to do with
shrinking the debt.  Raising the ceiling is about acknowledging what both
parties know — that under any fiscal scenario, we need to fund what Congress has already passed plus whatever it takes to fund a glide path back to
balanced budgets.

1. 2.  
   Newtown/Gun Control

Mr. Obama was heartfelt
and moving in his talk at the Newtown vigil last night. Everyone carried the
President’s words, but you may not have seen Gov. Molloy’s speech
or First Selectwoman Patricia Llodra’s,
but both were also very good.  

The Bushmaster .223
was the gun that killed most of the children in Newtown, it is an assault
rifle. It looks like this:

It
is similar to the AR-15 military weapon, except it doesn’t have an automatic/semi-automatic
selector switch. From 1994 to 2004, the Federal Assault
Weapons Ban
was in place (the Congressional Research Service’s report on gun violence is here).

After
Newtown, we should ask: Are shootings like this on the rise? Would a gun
control law make a difference? It is common to hear in these situations that
the weapons were acquired legally. This raises the issue of what would happen
if the law changed. There is some evidence:

Here
is a graph of the number of people killed or wounded in mass shootings since
1982. The grey area is the period of
the Assault Weapons Ban:

The
data are from a tabulation by Mark Follman at
Mother Jones.
Except for 1999, when Columbine and 4 other shootings happened, the assault ban
period was relatively peaceful by US standards:

Years	Shootings	Per year	People shot/year
1982-1994	19	1.5	25.5
1995-2004	16	1.6	20.9
2005-2012	27	3.4	54.8

Since
the end of the Ban in 2004, the number of shootings per year has doubled, and
the number of victims per year has nearly tripled. Three of the bloodiest four
years shown here occurred since the expiration. The numbers are not adjusted
for the increases in US population, although the CRS data adjusts for that
since it is per 100,000 population.

Some on the right were quick to do the bidding of
the NRA and the gun manufacturers. Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) said
of the school Principal Dawn Hochsprung:

You
read that correctly, Gohmert’s solution to this school massacre is to arm the teachers and Principals. That
would be the same teachers that his fellow travelers call union thugs, parasites who leech off of society with
their demands for fair pay, benefits, and secure pensions.


The teachers they claim work only part-time, with
plenty of paid vacation days throughout the year; who take the Jesus and prayer out of schools and replace Him
with secular crap like evolution and other science.


THESE are the people Gohmert would arm in the
classrooms of America’s children?  Please
Rep. Gohmert, choose from among your ideologies a bit more carefully!


Let’s dispose of the argument that killers won’t kill if they know another
armed person is nearby. Really?

There
were 42 cops killed this year in America by gunfire. Last year: 67 were killed. And 59 were killed the year before.

All
told, 1,132 cops have been killed
by guns in the last 22 years. 

Were any killed
by people who thought they were unarmed?