More Gun Deaths in the Tragic Commons

            Another high profile shooting in the Tragic Commons occurred this week.  This time, the victims were two highly attractive people, one, a television news reporter and the other, her cameraman.  They showed up for work like any other day, and only one person knew that they would not survive it.  That person was a disgruntled former co-worker who took their lives and his own.  We’ll never know whether the victims were special objects of his hate or merely convenient surrogates who could easily be killed before a live television audience.

            These shootings followed the low profile gun death of 17-year old Jajuan McRae in Prince George’s County last Friday.  The alleged shooter is also 17.

            There can be no doubt that these deaths are the direct result of an American culture of violence enabled by the ready availability of weapons designed specifically to kill or maim human beings.  There can be no argument that reporter Alison Parker, cameraman Adam Ward and 17 year old Jajuan McRae would be alive had the gunmen been armed, instead, with hammers, knives or a baseball bats.

            What’s that you say? “Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.  Guns are like hammers or knives or baseball bats.  They can be used for good or ill like any other tool.”

            Spare me. 

            People with guns are more likely to kill other people than people with hammers or knives or baseball bats.  People using guns can more easily kill people standing more than an arm’s length away than people using hammers, knives or baseball bats.  Guns make it easier to kill more people quickly than wielders of hammers, knives or baseball bats.  And it’s easier to stop someone who is wielding a hammer, a knife or a baseball bat than it is to stop a person who is wielding a gun.

            We have prudently regulated the use of other “tools” as their potential to kill or maim expands.  We require extensive training and insurance, for example, before we allow anyone to drive a car.  For good reason, you can’t just buy explosives at the local hardware store.  And only physicians can give you access to certain potentially harmful medications.

            And yet, in the Tragic Commons, guns are a special exception.  Despite their ability to kill or maim when used as they were designed to be used, you don’t need training or insurance to buy a gun or to own one.  You apparently also don’t need to prove you’re sane.

            Does this make any sense?

            Yes, I know that the Constitution gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms.  Yes, I know that the right to bear arms is as constitutionally sacred as the freedom of speech, the freedoms of assembly and conscience, the right to confront witnesses, and the right not to be forced to incriminate oneself.

            But, should it be?

            That a practice is venerable and even constitutionally protected is a consideration worthy of respect and even deference when devising public policy.   But deference and respect must yield when the practice is inimical to the Commons. Slavery, after all, was once a venerable and constitutionally protected practice.

            I do not see why, in our constitutional system, gun ownership should be given any special consideration. We need a constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech, of assembly and conscience to enable our democracy to work.  We need constitutionally protected rights for the criminally accused to prevent policing from descending into barbarism (to a greater extent than it already has). We have rightly chosen to take matters like these out of the hands of political majorities to protect those who cannot protect themselves through democratic processes. 

            The same is not true of gun ownership. States have no right to call up a local militia to oppose the will of the federal government.  We disposed of that argument at Appomattox Court House when General Robert E. Lee surrendered Confederate forces to Union General Ulysses S. Grant.  A state militia that depends on private gun ownership is laughable.

            And it should be manifest that despite the carnage, gun rights enthusiasts have been successful in stifling even the most basic and common sense gun regulations through ordinary democratic processes.  But even if they hadn't been successful, it’s not at all clear why their preferred policies ought to prevail over the wishes of popular majorities that might prefer other policies. You can’t always get what you want in a democracy, and there isn’t a reason anyone should always get what they want.

            The people blocking sensible gun regulations are members of a fearful and selfish little group, backed by an industry determined to protect its profits at all costs.  They resent the imposition of any inconvenience on access to their deadly toys.  They imagine threats to themselves, their homes and their families against which conventional law enforcement cannot protect them (though conventional law enforcement does a fine job in protecting almost everyone else). They overestimate the power guns will give them against adversaries and underestimate the probabilities that their weapons will be stolen or used against them or against their loved ones.  They refuse to see that their fetish with these tools of death results in unacceptable levels of avoidable bloodshed.

            An attitude of selfish individualism is what makes the Commons tragic.  People pursue their own interests unless we structure the environment in such a way that no one has any incentive to ignore what is best for the Commons.  Making it much harder for anyone to acquire and own an instrument of death would go a long way in insuring the tranquility of our community.  We must do a better job of keeping guns out of the hands of people who would use them for ill.  A good start would be to reduce the number of guns available by making them much more difficult to get.

Making the Trains Run on Time in the Tragic Commons

Today’s big government finds running Amtrak too large a challenge, and Trump’s roundup [of undocumented immigrants] would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent. But Trump wants America to think big. The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump’s project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion. There is precedent.

George Will

            The basic problem in the Tragic Commons is that despite the fact that our gains as a community are far greater when we cooperate, it’s always in everyone’s individual interest free-ride or cheat.  Who wouldn’t ordinarily wait for somebody else do the work or make the sacrifice for the community and then take advantage of the benefits that accrue?

            But we know this, and that’s why we spend so much time and effort trying to cope with the logic of human nature.  Sometimes we find that we can use incentives to get people to do what they know they should do anyway.  And sometimes, we realize that the inclination to be selfish is so strong that we must resort to penalties to discourage the behavior we don’t want.  Fortunately, we seem to have no shortage of people who derive great psychic pleasure from enforcing the rules we adopt as a community through democratic processes.

            Every once in a while, though, a vociferous segment of our population grows weary of our democracy.  The people in it have no inclination to contribute to the cost of encouraging people to do the right thing, and they lose patience with people who, despite our penalties insist on doing the wrong thing.  They get angry.  They lose faith in the admittedly slow, deliberative process through which our community makes decisions, particularly when we tend to make decisions they don’t particularly like.

            “What we need,” they conclude, “is a real leader who can make the Commons great again.”  They don’t care about his policies or his political ideology.  Even if they did, they have no inclination to make studied inquiries, either because they don’t have the intellectual tools to do so, or because they believe that nobody really cares about those things anyway. Except for the mainstream media that, as everyone knows, favors the other side.  What these denizens of the Tragic Commons want is a leader with a bold and abrasive personality promises results.

            So they latch on to a charismatic sort who promises to fix things using simple, common sense methods anyone could have thought up sitting around a kitchen table or a bar.  They are willing to trust him because he’s prone to saying all the things they believe deep down in their guts but won’t say publically for fear that the rest of us may become offended and begin to think ill of them.  It helps if their new leader seems beyond corruption, perhaps because he has already been successful in one realm or perhaps because he is extraordinarily rich.  After all, when you’re rich, as Tevyeh the milkman says, they think you really know.

            He feels their pain, though he’s never actually experienced it.  But, he knows who has caused it.  “Your woes are not your fault,” he tells them.  Instead,  “the blame for your problems rests at the feet of a discreet group of your neighbors who are not like you, who have no right to be here and who do not deserve the bounty of your Tragic Commons.  Let us deal shrewdly with them lest they conspire with our enemies to destroy our shining city on a hill.”

            The tactic is as ancient as the Pharaoh in Egypt who sought to exterminate the Israelites, or the ancient Persian courtier Haman who tried to get the Sultan to do the same thing.  As he, who, in accordance with Godwin’s Law, must not be named in an internet argument, found out, it doesn’t take much to convince ordinarily good, peaceful and civilized people that their salvation lies in rounding up their neighbors and putting them on boxcars bound for oblivion.

            You cannot blame the object of the people’s affection for any of this.  What is democracy but a marketplace of ideas?  Voters listen to the pitches of those who seek to lead and decide who is saying the things they most want to hear.  The bearer of those popular messages gains electoral support while the bearers of less popular messages become “also-rans.”  In the democracy of the Tragic Commons, the leader is nothing without the support of those who placed him in that position.

            And that, perhaps, is the most chilling thought of all: the leaders chosen reflect the choosers.  Even the unthinkable is thinkable in the Tragic Commons when good people give in to their frustrations and to their fears.

Martin O'Malley's Plan for Dignity in the Golden Years

 

            There’s a lot to like in presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s (D-MD) new plan for addressing the economic issues confronting the massive Baby Boom generation as it prepares to leave the labor force. Released under the headline “Expanding Social Security So Americans Can Retire With Dignity,” O’Malley’s plan touches all of the bases.

            O’Malley shoves back against Republicans who want to cut Social Security by privatizing it, means testing beneficiaries, using less generous cost of living adjustments and raising the retirement age.  O’Malley agrees with me that Social Security is not facing a crisis and that Republican claims that it is are “nothing more than misguided attempts to score political points at retiree’s expense.”

            Instead, he insists that Social Security benefits must be sufficient to keep retirees out of poverty.  To address the widening gap between rich and poor and the fact that a large percentage of Americans do not have sufficient savings to retire with dignity, he wants to increase benefits for lower and middle-income workers.  He would pay for his plan by lifting the cap on wages subject to the Social Security tax for workers earning more than $250,000 per year.

            But O’Malley’s plan is much more than a rousing defense of Social Security. He wants to address a number of other issues that affect the financial security of the elderly.  He wants to work with the private sector to “develop an efficient, affordable, and high-quality system to provide a diverse range of long-term care services” for seniors.  He wants to crack down on “unscrupulous lenders and scam artists” who “attempt to separate seniors from their lifelong earnings.”  And he wants to make it easier for people to save for retirement by requiring employers to “process an automatic employee contribution to an IRA . . . at a level determined by the employee (who would have the option to opt out).”

            Behind this plan is O’Malley’s clear-eyed understanding of why so many Americans have so little saved for retirement. “Millions of hardworking Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck,” he observes, and they often can’t afford to put anything aside for their “golden years.”  That is a wage problem, says O’Malley, and that is why support for a significant increase in the minimum wage and other policies that lead to higher pay for workers is “critical to ensuring that today’s workers can retire with dignity and security in the future.”

            The problem with the O’Malley plan, a problem I suspect it will share with all plans offered by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, is that it never comes to terms with the fact that not everyone agrees on what the “golden years” are and should be.

            When President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law 80 years ago, the world was a vastly different place.  Lifespans were shorter and work often involved a significant physical component for a sustained period of time.  After 30 or 40 years of toil, bodies were spent.  They simply couldn’t keep up, first with younger bodies seeking work and then later with the machines that ultimately replaced most of those bodies.  People retired because they had to, and Social Security guaranteed that those people would have some sort of an income during the few years remaining to them between retirement and the grave.

            There is still a sizable number of people who cannot work beyond their early 60s.  They no longer have the strength or they may have suffered a debilitating disease or accident.  There are also people who don’t have the training and are too old to retrain themselves for information-age careers.  The rules of the game changed on these people and they need to be cared for.

            But there are other people, often highly educated and capable of retraining, who aren’t looking forward to sitting on the porch and enduring endless rounds of golf for the quarter-century of life still allotted to them after age 65.  They may want to slow down, but they may also want to continue working, both because they want and need the income, and because they find that using their skills in the working world is satisfying and fulfilling.

            O’Malley is right to style this a discussion about human dignity.  That is why it is entirely appropriate to include in the discussion some attention to increasing wages, long-term care and the abuse of seniors by the unscrupulous.  All that is missing is a plank addressing the subtle age discrimination older workers face in finding and keeping meaningful permanent employment.

            The O’Malley plan is far more than the simple-minded discussions about raising the retirement age or keeping Social Security in actuarial balance that the Republicans seem to want to have.  It is, instead, a chance to begin a discussion about what we have a right to expect our country to do for us at every stage of our lives, what we should be willing to do for ourselves and what we should be willing to pay for it.  But that discussion can only make sense as part of a new social contract that defines what it means to be an American in the 21^st century.

Why Republicans Aren't Afraid of Latino Voters

 

            After Donald Trump and a number of other Republican presidential hopefuls signaled their willingness to ignore or try to repeal the provision of the 14^th Amendment that grants any person born in the United States citizenship, Paul Waldman of the Washington Post wrote an article asking whether Republicans had just given away the 2016 election.

            The idea that we should ignore or reinterpret the 14^th Amendment is outrageous to anyone who believes in the rule of law.  And the notion that anyone ought to spend any time trying to amend this provision out of the Constitution—it takes a 2/3 vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and the approval of ¾ of the states—is ludicrous.

            Waldman’s point, though, wasn’t that these candidates had taken a position most Americans would consider to be obnoxious.  Looking at our country’s changing demographics, Waldman was saying that positions like these are particularly offensive to Americans of Hispanic descent, and given the increase in the number of Latinos and the decrease in the number of whites, alienating (no pun intended) the former was an ill-conceived electoral strategy.

            In the long run, Waldman is right.  The supply of conservative white Americans is on the decline, and if Republicans want to have a chance to remain relevant into the 21^st century, they have to do something to reach out to the increasing number of Americans with Hispanic, African and Asian ancestry.  It’s not enough to argue that you are the party of freedom and economic opportunity when the party is also busy making it clear that part of the audience isn’t really welcome.

            Yet, Waldman may not be right about the electoral consequences of this attitude on the 2016 presidential election.  While there may indeed be many more Latinos and fewer whites in the U.S. in 2016 than ever before, those factors are likely to have a muted effect on our politics.

            Under the Constitution, the real election of a president depends on the Electoral College in which every state gets a number of votes equal to the size of its congressional delegation plus 2.  Regardless of the popular vote, whoever wins 270 electoral votes becomes the next president.

            Generally, the Electoral College vote result tracks the popular vote, and there have only been a handful of cases in which the popular vote and the Electoral College vote were at odds.  The last time it happened was when George W. Bush was elected in 2000.

            For all of the states except Maine and Nebraska, it doesn’t matter whether a candidates wins with 50.1% of the vote or with 99% of the vote.  Whoever wins a state’s popular vote receives all of the state’s Electoral College votes  And that’s why Waldman’s observation might not be correct.

            In the last presidential election, only 15 states were decided by five percentage points or less.  The winners in the rest of the states had much larger margins of victory.  Most of the states are safely “red or “blue” and aren’t likely to flip to the other party.  That’s why, in 2012, the candidates spent much more time and money in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida and not much time or money in Maryland.

            Using data from the Federal Election Commission and the Census Bureau, Table 1 shows the 15 states with the smallest margins of victory, ranked from the

Table 1

States	Dem %	Raw Obama	Raw Romney	Dem Margin	Available Hispanic Votes	Needed for Change
MI	54.80%	2,564,569	2,115,256	449,313	158000	224656.5
MN	53.94%	1,546,167	1,320,225	225,942	44000	112971
WI	53.52%	1,620,985	1,407,966	213,019	71000	106509.5
NV	53.41%	531,373	463,567	67,806	157000	33903
IA	52.96%	822,544	730,617	91,927	30000	45963.5
NH	52.83%	369,561	329,918	39,643	15000	19821.5
CO	52.75%	1,323,102	1,185,243	137,859	259000	68929.5
PA	52.73%	2,990,274	2,680,434	309,840	184000	154920
VA	51.97%	1,971,820	1,822,522	149,298	103000	74649
OH	51.51%	2,827,709	2,661,437	166,272	98000	83136
FL	50.44%	4,237,756	4,163,447	74,309	1399000	37154.5
NC	48.97%	2,178,391	2,270,395	-92,004	95000	-46002
GA	46.04%	1,773,827	2,078,688	-304,861	114000	-152430.5
AZ	45.39%	1,025,232	1,233,654	-208,422	400000	-104211
MO	45.22%	1,223,796	1,482,440	-258,644	63000	-129322

Source: http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.shtml

highest margin of victory for President Obama to the smallest margin of loss.  It also shows the raw vote totals, the number of votes needed to equalize the outcomes for each state and the number of people in each of these states who were both registered to vote and claimed to be of Hispanic ancestry.

            If you do the math, you’ll see that even if Mitt Romney had every single Latino vote in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa and New Hampshire, there were not enough of those votes to move the state from the Democratic column to the Republican column. 

            Similarly, Barack Obama could not have changed the results in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia or Missouri by winning every single Latino vote, again because there weren’t enough Hispanic voters to offset Romney’s advantages with other groups.

            The only states in which there were enough Hispanic votes to change the outcome were Nevada, Colorado and Florida.  Table 2 shows the improvement in performance with Latinos Mr. Romney would have needed to win the state.

Table 2

State	Romney Share Hispanic Vote	Needed Share	Improvement in Performance
Nevada	29%	51%	22%
Colorado	25%	52%	27%
Florida	40%	43%	3%

Calculations based on Federal Election Commission, Census Bureau and Exit Poll Data

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/p20/2012/tables.html
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.shtml 

http://www2.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president/

            Increasing Latino vote share in excess of 20 percentage points is unlikely and so Nevada and Colorado were probably both off the table.  Let’s spot Florida to the Republicans—Floridians Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have taken pains not to antagonize Latinos—and Barack Obama still wins the election with 303 Electoral College votes. 

            Instead of courting Latinos, it makes much more sense for a Republican candidate to try to expand the number of white voters in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania who feel resentful of the new brown faces popping up in their communities.

            Of course, there would be a completely different outcome dictating a completely different strategy if we did away with the Electoral College.  In that case, the Latino voters living in places where their votes are now “wasted” would make a much bigger difference.  But that too would take a constitutional amendment.

            There will come a day when offending Latino voters will matter to Republican presidential candidates.  But that day is not today.