More Chaos

The Daily Escape:

Lenticular clouds over Mt. Adams, WA – October 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

The news is awful and the time to cover it is short. So here’s a few thoughts on the fly:

First, about Lewiston. This is another American tragedy caused by the AR-15. The effort to paint the problem as another mentally-ill person who unfortunately happened to snap has already begun.

And on average, more than one gun per capita is owned by Americans. The Framers couldn’t have conceived of such violence from one gun. Wrongo is fully aware that it is highly unlikely that guns will ever be brought under better control, unless we happen to become the autocracy that many on the Right want us to be.

The Supreme Court’s ideas about originalism and what was meant by a “well-regulated militia” back in the 1770s, made Wrongo take a look at the demographics of the era. In 1790, the US population was around 3.9 million people, excluding Indians and slaves (as they did back then).

And if you try to determine what a rifle owned by one of America’s well-regulated militia cost in the 1770s, you uncover an almost insoluble problem. There was no national currency, each state had its own. Most were expressed in pounds, but each varied in value in relation to the English pound that they were based on.

Despite all of the problems of comparisons, in 1775, a week’s wages for a Massachusetts agricultural laborer were about 3.75 MA pounds. Across the colonies, a long rifle of medium quality cost between 4-7 pounds, so an average worker could acquire a rifle for less than two week’s wages.

That probably meant that like today, there were at least as many guns as men in colonial America.

The well-regulated militia as a deterrent to tyranny made sense until the time of muzzle loaders came to an end. From roughly 1500 – 1850, militias could fight on relatively equal ground with professional soldiers. But once artillery got good enough to chew up massed formations with only a few cannons, the rifle and other small arms became of secondary value in the fight against tyranny because citizen militias could no longer stand up to formal militaries.

Today, small arms play a different role in combat than when the Constitution was written. If the Second Amendment people were serious about wanting to be able to fight off their government they should be arguing to legalize artillery and explosives. They should conduct anti-armored drone drills, weekend artillery practice, and crowd-fund air defense systems.

Think of it as: Today, guns are worthless for fighting tyranny, but they’re perfect for imposing it.

Now, onward to the House of Representatives, and the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, (R-LA). We now have an insurrectionist religious fundamentalist conspiracy theorist who’s second in line for the presidency should something happen to Biden. The House GOP caucus just unanimously elected a traitor.

This needs to be on billboards nationwide.

The election of Johnson represents the surrender by the remaining non-MAGA Republicans to the minority MAGA fringe of their Party. It is a debacle for what the GOP used to stand for in America. And given that funding for the government runs out in a few weeks, a fight between what is now a fully-controlled MAGA House and the House Democrats is inevitable.

To say you’re a Republican in America in 2023 but don’t support Trump makes about as much sense as saying you’re a Communist Party member in the USSR in 1950 but don’t support Stalin.

We should expect a very long shutdown.

House Democrats have to make their fights with House Republicans as loud as possible. They need to make public remarks every day, regardless of their impact on private negotiations. Dems need to make sure everyone knows what the demands by Johnson and the MAGA extremists he leads mean to citizens.

We have to expect that Beltway pundits and the editorial boards of the WaPo and the NYT will attempt to push Biden and Democrats to work with the new Speaker. But, that is a lost cause. House Democrats should work in a bipartisan manner with the (slightly) more reasonable Senate and then turn the fight back to the GOP House in a big public event.

Here’s a tweet by Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

Martin sees this as giving a political advantage to Democrats, but the problem he ignores is the chaos. Is it possible that any order can come out of the MAGA chaos? Johnson is still vulnerable to the rule that a single disgruntled Republican House member can initiate the process to oust him, just as Matt Gaetz (R-FL) did with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

If four of the other 220 House Republicans agree, he will lose his job. So a reasonable view is to expect more Republican chaos.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a roller coaster ride from here to next November.

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It’s Not Just The Guns, It’s The Ammo

The Daily Escape:

Antarctica – May, 2022 photo by Jason Row Photography

Wrongo shot the AR-15 at Fort Ord, CA while in the military in 1966. Back then, the US Army had its Combat Developments Experimentation Command, known as CDEC, there. Fort Ord is now closed, but its location on Monterey Bay in California, made it a beautiful place to spend a weekend, if not military training.

In the 1960s, Fort Ord was the home of the 4th Replacement Training Center, with upward of 50,000 soldiers preparing for their upcoming tour of Vietnam. As part of our training, we participated in the night fire tests of the AR-15. Those tests simulated the conditions that small squads faced in combat. The idea was to compare the performance of the AR-15 against the M-14, the incumbent weapon.

The Army adopted the lighter AR-15 in a model they called the M-16. James Fallows, writing in 1988 in The Atlantic, said this about the weapon:

“By the middle of 1967, when the M-16 had been in combat for about a year and a half, a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their unreliable equipment and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen to attract the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, which formed an investigating subcommittee.”

The subcommittee examined the problems caused by the M-16, and Fallows’ article is worth reading to see how badly the Army procurement process failed the US soldier in Vietnam. The Army made several changes to the AR-15 as it became the M-16. All of them served to make the weapon unreliable in combat conditions and less useful as a weapon of war.

But Wrongo wants to focus on the M-16’s high velocity bullet. From Fallows:

“Nearly a century before American troops were ordered into Vietnam, weapons designers had made a discovery in the science of ‘wound ballistics.’ The discovery was that a small, fast-traveling bullet often did a great deal more damage than a larger round when fired into….a human body…”

On Sunday, 60 Minutes re-broadcast a story on the lethality of the AR-15. The focus was on how the gun’s high velocity rounds cause devastating and often lethal wounds that first responders and emergency rooms have great difficulty repairing.

The Intercept brings this back to the Uvalde shooting: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“Many circumstances of this week’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are incomprehensible….The [wound] damage was so severe that agonized parents had to give DNA samples to identify their children.”

Imagine. The request pointed to the obvious: Many of the children who had been killed were so grievously injured that it was impossible to identify their bodies. And that DNA identification process took hours.

Much of the damage was because in addition to the killer using the AR-15, a weapon of war, he also used hollow point bullets, one of the most physically destructive forms of ammunition. Hollow-point bullets open upon impact thereby causing more damage to their targets:

Source: Guns and Ammo

They can easily be purchased throughout the US, but the rest of the world thinks the use of expanding rounds on the battlefield is a war crime. The International Criminal Court bars their use, and they are prohibited by a declaration of the Hague Convention (which of course, the US has never ratified).

The US military has authorized hollow-point ammo. Civilian ammosexual proponents of the hollow-point ammo argue that the bullet reduces harm to nearby civilians, since it’s less likely to pass through its intended target or to ricochet. They also say that it’s useful in hunting big game, so the animal can be killed in one hit. Just like it works in 10 year-old grammar school students.

More from the Intercept:

“Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde, purchased 375 expanding rounds. In 2019, a 21-year-old gunman in El Paso, Texas, bought 1,000 of the same type of bullets for his Walmart rampage. The 20-year-old gunman in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting managed to stockpile 1,700 of various rounds, including hollow points.”

None of these purchases raised any flags with ammo retailers.

It cannot be emphasized enough, however, exactly what the AR-15 is: It is a weapon of war. It was made to blow humans apart. It is successful in doing just that. Back in the 1960s during those early field tests, the military learned that the AR-15 excelled at blowing people apart. Let’s give Rod Miller the final word:

“Armed Americans are killing our schoolkids while they study. They routinely kill them by the dozens for various reasons all across our country. Let me repeat that, armed Americans are killing our schoolkids.”

Can we at least ban hollow-point ammo for use by private citizens?

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Maryland Ruling Shows Way Forward On Banning AR-15s

The Daily Escape:

Near the Cho La Pass, Nepal – 2018 photo by northern_eyes

It is another depressing week in America. Trump may, or may not fire Robert Mueller. Facebook is, or is not the enemy of the people. We will, or will not have a government shutdown on Friday. There is one or more bombers loose in Austin, TX.

And Maryland is in the news about guns, with yet another high school shooting on Tuesday in a town called Great Mills, MD, about 70 miles from Washington, DC.

The shooter is dead, killed by a single shot from an armed school resource officer. Two students were shot by the gunman, who used a pistol in his attack. Pat Elder told the Institute for Public Accuracy:

I was at Great Mills High School last night, teaching GED.

Elder is a director of an organization that confronts militarism in the schools. They just launched a new campaign to shut down high school marksmanship programs. Elder also said: (emphasis by Wrongo)

There are hundreds of trailer homes around the school. There’s tattoo shops and liquor stores. Nearby, there’s Lockheed and CACI and other military contractors….My son went to the school….Regardless of the specifics of this attack, we have to face up to the reality that militarization of our society, especially our schools, fuels the violence that causes so much suffering….

At least the Maryland school shooter only had a pistol. While it isn’t clear that the shooter only having a pistol is connected, Maryland’s law banning 45 kinds of assault weapons and its 10-round limit on gun magazines was upheld by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA in February. From NBC:

In a 10-4 ruling, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, said the guns banned under Maryland’s law aren’t protected by the Second Amendment.

Judge Robert King wrote for the court:

Put simply, we have no power to extend Second Amendment protection to the weapons of war that the Heller decision explicitly excluded from such coverage….

He is referring to the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia. You can read King’s opinion here.

King said that weapons similar to those banned by Maryland have been used to perpetrate mass shootings in places “whose names have become synonymous with the slaughters that occurred there.” King listed Newtown, Aurora, CO, San Bernardino, and Orlando in his opinion.

King also noted that Maryland’s enacting of the law is:

Precisely the type of judgment that legislatures are allowed to make without second-guessing by a court…. Simply put, the State has shown all that is required: a reasonable, if not perfect, fit between the (Firearms Safety Act) and Maryland’s interest in protecting public safety….

The purpose of laws such as the Maryland ban is to protect the public from the criminal misuse of highly dangerous weapons. Perhaps we are on a good arc with this ruling. It answers the question of whether the Second Amendment provides a blanket right of a citizen to own weapons of a very high degree of firepower and lethality.

Wrongo has fired the AR-15 and the M-15 many, many times. At one point, he could disassemble and reassemble the M-15 blindfolded. He has no issue with people owning guns. But, there can be no debate that semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 have one purpose, the destruction of human life. These weapons of war don’t just kill people; they wound in ways which often make it exceedingly difficult to patch people back together again.

No law will ever stop someone with a pistol from shooting up a school. But it’s past time for rational Americans to seize control of the conversation about semi-automatic rifles, and change a few laws.

Make ‘em like Maryland’s.

Let’s hope that the ruling by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals is the first step in that direction.

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Saturday Soother – February 24, 2018

The Daily Escape:

The futuristic Tianjin Binhai Library opened in November 2017. It is located just outside Beijing, China – photo by Ossip van Duivenbode

Another roller coaster week comes to an end, but Wrongo can’t let go of the Parkland shooting or the gun debate just yet. So here are a few observations from a devastating article in the Atlantic by a radiologist in Florida who saw the CT scans of some of the student’s wounds:

As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.

More:

In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

Still more:

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15…There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

Had enough? Here’s more:

Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and they do not bleed to death before being transported to…a trauma center, chances are, we can save the victim. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different; they travel at higher velocity and are far more lethal. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than, and imparting more than three times the energy of, a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun.

And finally:

One of my ER colleagues was waiting nervously for his own children outside the school. While the shooting was still in progress, the first responders were gathering up victims whenever they could and carrying them outside the building. Even as a physician trained in trauma situations, though, there was nothing he could do at the scene to help to save the victims who had been shot with an AR-15. Most of them died on the spot, with no fighting chance at life.

This is why these weapons must be banned. Even if America sells no more of them, it will take a generation or more, for them to disappear from general use. The sooner we start banning them, the safer the country will be. Make America Safe Again!

Now, settle back in your most comfy chair with a vente cup of Red Beard Coffee’s Buckshot Blend ($17.95/lb.). The roaster says it tastes of rich caramel and apples. Then, contemplate what you can do personally to help high school kids all across America in their effort to ban AR-15’s.

While you are sitting quietly, listen to the Irish group, The Corrs, covering REM’s hit “Everybody Hurts”.  This is from “The Corrs Unplugged”, one of the MTV Unplugged series, recorded live in October, 1999. A song appropriate to the last two weeks:

Sample Lyric:

When your day is long
And the night,
The night is yours alone
When you’re sure you’ve had enough
Of this life
Well hang on
Don’t let yourself go
‘Cause everybody cries
And everybody hurts sometimes

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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