Gypsy Christmas, firearms, and kamikaze starships

I can’t remember if I’ve written in here about the Gypsy district of the Rose City cemetery; I mean, about my discovery of the long-running cultural battle between the Gypsies and the management… (Here is a news snippet I found about it.)  Anyway, as I write this, there are – in direct contravention of the amusingly draconian rules posted here and there throughout the cemetery, that clearly stem from just that conflict – full-sized Christmas trees standing on a lot of the Gypsy graves, decked out with red balls, tied with rope to the monuments to keep them upright. One has a three-foot-high placard with Frosty the Snowman smiling on it.

And on the great family vaults – there are big happy holly wreaths on the "front doors." You don’t think of crypts looking welcoming, but it made a body want to stop and knock.
 
I’m with the Gypsies on this one.
 
It did wonders for my mood. The whole way home I was singing "Children’s Day at the Morgue."
 
EDIT: Here’s what they pull around Easter.
 
 
***
 
 
I have been thinking a great deal about the questions of gun control and of self-defense and so on after the massacre of the children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
 
(It’s curious what brings it home and makes it real. When I first heard it from my mother when I walked into the house returning from the movies, it didn’t really sink in at first – only a collection of words; "news." Through the evening it deepened from there. In the end the hardest blow was a couple of days later, when I read a list of the victims with their birth dates. 2005… 2006… 2005…. Reading this at the end of 2012.   It brought the children into view, their childness, their year. The page I was reading became unnaturally clear in my vision with the very incredulity; my mind was trying to make the import not so.)
 
What then must we do? Anything? Nothing? Something? Is this too infrequent to build part of our world around? (For frequency must be considered.) But how infrequent would that be? (Given the nature of it.) What crucially about this situation, that is in our power, must be changed?
 
The whirling abstractions of proportion. That are not abstract at all. Consider the NRA’s "contribution" – armed volunteers at every school. As if oncoming child-hunting lunatics were now the main feature of the schools – eclipsing any possible bad outcomes that might come from, for example, armed teachers or armed volunteers at every school. (Never mind that the categories of child-hunting lunatics and armed volunteers might at some point overlap…) It is materially bad to assume that absolutely stopping a particular horrible thing from ever happening is the only consideration there is. Which is why the windows have to stay open to all the hard strange questions.
 
One thing that bothers me in this question is that what has been being discussed is "gun control and mental health" – and all the hubbub is in fighting over the matter of gun control, while everyone agrees that something should be done in the matter of how we deal with mental health; everyone agrees the mental health side is important. (I leave aside the question of whether anything in the area of mental health could stop every single person from running amok, or, more realistically, the question how much difference better mental health arrangements could make.) The problem that I suspect is that… I don’t think that the fact that no one disagrees with the mental health aspect means that appropriate changes will definitely accordingly be made on the mental health side. Quite the reverse – I fear that the fact that no one is arguing against this, that everyone agrees that it is important, means that nothing will be done about it.  I’ll bet that mental health services remain in the same state of relevant neglect that they are in now. This business won’t put any extra weight on the scales when the question of relevant funding comes up, or anything. Because what everyone is going on about is the contentious thing – people are on the ramparts for-and-against over on the opposite side of the room.  (Heck, will you even remember I brought up mental health by the end of this entry?)
 
I think that the things that everyone agrees with, that no one disputes, are the things that – well, they don’t become political footballs – they become political hedgehogs that are quietly kicked to death over in the corner. Because the important stuff is what everyone is talking about. And so it goes.
 
(Compare and contrast the Bill of Rights, for example, if you want to get depressed. Everyone in these United States in which I reside holds high the rights guaranteed us in the Bill of Rights. Of course we do. We’ll all tell you we do. We are together on that. And, meanwhile, we have been surrounded by urgent and contentious needs – drugs! criminals! terrorists! And we talk endlessly about what to do about these dramatic needs and not to do about them. At the end of the progression, with its historical complications and drama, and … everyone still venerates the Bill of Rights, vaguely, in a general way, but … well, for example, the Fourth Amendment will still protect you in a way that… well, no, it won’t; today it will fail to protect you in practice even where it is held to apply, and it is held not to apply across huge areas where you’d swear it ought to; and I could bring up other matters where conspiracy against Constitutionally guaranteed due process is these days pretty much a core prosecutorial function… and this is what happens in regard to the things that everyone has agreed on all along.)
 
(There is something else I could write, and should, about the special circumstances under which I have been thinking that such things can be successfully upheld and kept fresh, but that’s for another time.)
 
So, what’s being argued about now is the area of gun control. I’d better go over and talk about that.
 
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is for many people an exception to the pattern of vague assent I have just been moaning about – to a degree that would make one think it was part of the Bible. (That in itself I would not call out of bounds; I’m that way about the First Amendment.) What is curious is what goes along with the veneration. There is, for example, a widely-held conviction that the reason why the Founders (such a unitary expression) put the Second Amendment into the Constitution was to enable the armed power of individual citizens to counterbalance the armed power of their governments, local, state, or national, so that the power of the State could not become excessive. One would think that thewording of the Amendment, and the commentary about it at the time, would have been much clearer on such an extraordinary point.
 
The modern version of this has taken the supposed eternal need for an armed citizenry and has crossbred it with the twentieth century’s experience with totalitarian regimes, to produce a frequently encountered vision in which the forces of totalitarianism are presently and always poised in America – the future that is always ready to happen, and the real truth behind the bland institutional government and the political party one doesn’t like – and in which the only thing holding them back from taking open omnipotent control is the presence of too many guns in private hands. Hence any and every move toward some degree of gun control is taken to be a ploy of the forces of communo-fascism, and must be fought against absolutely. (Which, to be sure, is again similar to the way I approach supporting the ACLU and its legal battles in support of the various provisions of the whole Bill of Rights. In the same way, the health and power of those guarantees is, … or would be, damn … a necessary and sufficient bulwark against a great many possible things.)
 
(Not to draw too much equivalency. My sense of humor isn’t quite that good here. A commitment to the Constitution is in part a commitment to faith in democracy in the patterns set forth in the Bill of Rights; this kind of worldview centered on the Second is very close to a disconnection of any sort of faith in democracy, or a contempt for it or actually a denial of it, because the main thing is the dream of being armed against it. My support of the Bill of Rights by necessity involves an attempted specificity about what those various rights are; I wish that the people who see the Second Amendment as the wellspring of freedom had, as a class, such a clear general notion of the relevance of the other bits to freedom. Often their main emphasis other than on the Second is a reading of the Tenth Amendment, with emphasis on its maximum inconvenience for the Federal state they see as lurking Leviathan, and otherwise they are apt to see proper treatment of the Bill of Rights as being one in which the good guys win – accused criminals being caught and convicted, the Christian side winning wherever it is involved in a dispute, anything "bad" or offensive to the "right-minded people" losing by whatever route, the wrong side being given no breaks. Very often they are sure that these enthusiasms are commitment to the Constitution, right-minded commitment. And they are made very, very suspicious of the ACLU, to the point of almost always thinking it to be an implacable enemy constantly working against them, even though it has defended people and issues "on their side" over and over again, precisely because it has defended those people and issues because of the Bill of Rights and not because it is on their side. No, I don’t look for the Second Amendment gun-carriers to defend American freedom, or freedom in general.)
 
But I was going to think about what to do about guns, in the wake of the Connecticut slaughter?
 
(There was also a mass shooting at the Clackamas Town Centre mall here in Portland, a few days before. That fellow fired hundreds of rounds, but only killed three people. Apparently he was a bad shot, and also, given the size of a mall, he was often shooting at range. Hoping that shooters will not be able to hit anything is not an approach.  The old man who set his house on fire in New York just before Christmas and then lay in wait for the fire department was a better shot.)
 
Here I run not only into the question of what the Second Amendment would allow but my own assumptions about rights. This will get uncomfortable for me.
 
Where I would begin: I would assume, as a general statement, that people have the right to defend themselves against being murdered. I have in fact gotten quite angry in the past about (very rare) encounters with a contrary position, an actual direct denial of this (the last one came from Britain, I think) – which implies that people must allow themselves to be murdered, if they cannot escape or avoid it in any nonlethal way and if the responsible representatives of the state, the police, are not there to save them, because it should actually be illegal for them to strike back in a way that kills, and they would be guilty of murder if they did do so. This to me would imply that the citizen is then actually owned by the state/society, not his or her own possession, and is therefore obligated to choose and accept extinction when another person is trying to rob him or her of life, because that’s his or her place relative to the society’s preferences. This is an intolerable conclusion to me. Hence, a right to self-defense and reason for a legal right to it that would be an exception to laws against manslaughter.
 
But… a right to self-defense is usually neither disputed nor absent. And the right of self-defense usually is not an isolated ideal proposition; in practice it comes accompanied with assumptions. Which is where the real topic is.
 
I would also generally assume a secondary right, an extension of the right to self-defense, which is that, if a person has a right to self-defense, the person has the right, or should have the right, to obtain or arrange means of doing so.  A person may do this. This is a step more controversial, and is tricky. One of its angles would be roughly consistent with the Second Amendment, but it might also cover the right to have a weapon of any sort, bludgeon, bladed, or what have you – or the right to take karate courses.  It becomes a topic where to put reasonable edges on this right. What about burying mines in your yard, or pit-traps or deadfalls? Those things are illegal under American law, everywhere in America, as far as I know. So the question of what means of self-defense are unreasonable or excessive to allow is a topic; some means clearly are.
 
And the same applies to some exercises of self-defense. If a man painstakingly manufactured a whole lot of phosgene gas in his basement and used it to wipe out his entire little town one night, and he did it because he genuinely believed and was terrified that all his fellow townspeople were conspiring to kill him and were going to come for him at any time, his lawyer would undoubtedly have a sound argument for his not being guilty by reason of insanity, but his right of self-defense wouldn’t cover the situation, and it wouldn’t even if his entire town genuinely hated him and he might in fact have been in danger. So some exercises of the right of self-defense are too excessive to allow as well.
 
So. What – within these assumptions, and also assuming that the Second Amendment makes it impossible to actually ban guns for self-defense across the board – would be something that could be done that would have changed what was possible at Sandy Hook, or Clackamas Town Centre, or wherever else?
 
(I will deliberately neglect the problems of gathering up unapproved guns, or of the vast quantities of guns of all sorts already out there in America, and etc. These things are real, and huge, and a lot of people here would hide their guns for ideological reasons rather than turn them in for any bounty at all; Australia managed a fairly amazing gun collection through buying them up, but I don’t know enough about it, and I’m very far from sure that America is enough like Australia in this regard. But if I set this aside…)
 
What’s a fit?
 
Well, under these rules, I’ve been quite interested in one proposal, which focuses on both ammunition capacity and the ease of reloading. It would disallow most guns available or for sale now, but never mind that. What if, for purposes of self-defense, a citizen were allowed to carry a six-shot revolver – that is to say, there’s no clip, the bullets must be laboriously reloaded by hand – and also the widgets that help you load all six chambers of a revolver at once were banned?
 
It would be one sensible candidate. I don’t know that it’s the best candidate, but: How many bullets do you need to defend your life, if it is in danger? In one view, just one. Which is over-ideal. This would allow you six. For deterrence, also, which we have not considered, a person with a revolver is not "a person with only six bullets," it’s a person who can shoot.
 
You could defend yourself against a threat. But you would not be able to simultaneously control a situation with a lot of frightened people while continuing to endlessly shoot. If you ran out of bullets, you would not be able to reload nearly instantly. If you wanted to continue to control anything, you’d have to stop shooting before your six bullets were used up. You would have a very different situation than the school shooters, mall shooters, and other crowd killers have had.
 
So, restricting people to six-shot revolvers would be one kind of solution.
 
(By the way, I think that gun-control advocates in the U.S. would have a chance of getting further, and wouldn’t sound nearly as tin eared, if they did indeed talk in this way about self-defense when talking about sensible restriction of guns. In the few days after the Connecticut shooting, I was exasperated by a note I heard struck repeatedly: "No one needs an assault rifle for hunting!" … Excuse me, can I have a word? No one wants these guns for hunting. I’ve heard people declare that no one needs handguns for hunting either, and the same is true there. People who have guns other than hunting rifles want those guns for self-defense. When you will only say that no one hunts with such-and-such a gun, as a reason to ban it, people are aware that you know that these guns are for shooting people but you are playing cagey. When you do this, it will sound to the more paranoid as if you are plotting to take away their self-defense option through misdirection, and it will make some people in the middle drift over toward paranoid. Please rethink this. Talk about what’s crazy for self defense.)
 
Meanwhile… I have been reading about a different approach, in Australia, that doesn’t seem for its part to have been a disaster.  Hat tip to Arbi for sparking me.
 
Australia allows ownership of some guns if the owner can provide a Genuine Reason (capitalized, because it’s a special defined thing) for why he or she needs that gun. Pest control, sport shooting, what have you. Some classes of guns are much more restricted or are entirely unavailable. Semi-automatic guns (guns doing all the preparation for firing the next round except actually firing) aren’t available.
 
What’s curious to me is that self-defense does not qualify as a Genuine Reason to own a gun. You may not own a gun for that purpose.
 
This made my hair stand up all over my body for the first minute or so after I heard about it – because: Does this mean that self-defense is not a thing in Australia?
 
No. Australia has a legal self-defense exception to the murder/manslaughter laws. I could exhale.
 
But the differences are interesting.
 
(Can you own other kinds of weapons for the purpose of self-defense? I haven’t investigated. I imagine so, but maybe only in a way that is sort of passive or common-sense; you can own a cricket bat or a fire extinguisher or a shovel, which are regular objects which you can own, and you don’t have to actually tell anyone why you own a cricket bat. It is possible that you might use any of these things for self-defense, and possible that you might kill someone with them in the process. It’s also possible that you might use a gun that you own for other reasons in the same way, if it came to it. But you won’t be allowed to get a firearm because you want one for that reason.)
 
What especially struck me when I hurriedly followed up on Australian self-defense was a proviso in the laws of the various states, which is interesting, and which is not contrary at all to the concept of self-defense in the United States, or not directly contrary, but which carries a different tone, at least as far as I know.
 
The provisos seem to all boil down to saying that, if a person uses force that he or she genuinely believes is necessary in order to save himself or herself from a threat he or she genuinely believes is real and deadly, but if a reasonable person would find that this person was mistaken about either of these things, then the crime is changed from murder to manslaughter, with a lower sentence.
 
That’s an emphasis that is deliberately and specifically quite different from the presumption in the U.S. – the social presumption; I don’t know enough to characterize the law well – which is that genuine fear for your life will do it, that that fear is a full justification and a full legal reason.
 
It is also quite different from the picture – the cartoon – of a self-defense shooter as the hero of the story.
 
This approach toward guns and this approach toward careful checking of the necessity of lethal action or outcome in self-defense combined to make another frame… where you are not supposed to be killing in self-defense. You’re not supposed to with a gun; you’re not supposed to at all.
 
It’s not uncommon in America to find the presumption that you are supposed to, in a way that goes beyond "if you have to" or "if you have to kill", or that drowns them out. I’ve read American gun owners who, by contrast, build their whole lives around the day when they may defend their families by shooting an intruder. You may note that I said "the intruder" – a frightening person, of course, who must be presumed to be an immediate deadly threat, so that the necessity of shooting is clear. The people I’ve read would find my pointing out of that "intruder" in a questioning tone despicable. The laws of Australia treat it as a very real question. You cannot execute a burglar just to be on the safe side. You’re not supposed to kill him.
 
How well Australia’s approach works (and what is "works"?) is something I’ll have to do more reading on. (And, as I say, the question of how well an Australian style buy-back could work in America is a very large question.)
 
But it does … reproach me? blow cold on my shoulders? … a little when I try to think about what would be a reasonable gun control solution in America, from the starting place of America’s assumptions and of my own. Because, though I certainly start at a different place, Australia’s approach emphasizes considerations that I also like very much. (Understatement.)
 
 
***
 
 
Yesterday morning, with my Christmas check from my dad, I made what I would like to believe is an atypically irresponsible purchase… I went and spent more money on a computer game than I ever expect to spend on one again.
 
The game is a strategy game that has looked marvelous but is evidently not widely known, that I have been thinking about getting since last spring, since I could talk about it with Gwen in fact… and it’s the sort of thing that was just going to keep pecking at the back of my mind until I finally got it. Peck, peck, peck, it became The Thing That Was Being Put Off. Such a thing rarely goes away before it’s lanced.
 
(*sigh* There is of course an argument that any such purchase will end up saving money, because, when I am playing this game, I won’t be tempted to entertain myself in any way that costs money, and I’ll probably spend many happy hours playing the game now and then for years. It’s very logical. And, of course, when I’m at home, I’m almost never tempted to spend money to entertain myself in the first place, and, when I find myself out and about, which is when I get the brainstorms about how to burn cash, the computer game isn’t present. Nice try, forebrain, but back to reality.)
 
Anyway. Distant Worlds. So expensive because, as reviewers unanimously agree, it began as an unmanageably complex game that required the two subsequent updates, Return of the Shakturi and Legends, to make it actually playable and to become the great game that it had the potential to be. So I had to make three purchases. (I can’t think of a more crippling marketing model. If they just bundled it all into a single finished game and sold that, people would be able to buy the damn thing in a single move! As things stand, whether to purchase this game in a decently playable form is not a decision, it is a Subject. Which is where word of mouth goes to die.)
 
It is an interstellar strategy game, with a plausibly galaxy-sized "board", because the scroll wheel on your mouse allows you to zoom out to the level of the entire galaxy or to zoom in to the level of individual planets and spaceships.
 
I am in the awkward phase where I don’t know how to play yet. "Playable" doesn’t mean you don’t have to learn. For the moment I am leaving almost all functions of my civilization automated, while I try to figure out what I am supposed to do.
 
And I am finding that even the AI gets confused. Last night, as a session was just getting under way, I noticed my Second Fleet – which at that time comprised the bulk of my navy – suddenly putting out to space at high speed. I found that their target was a Giant Kaltor – a spacegoing life form, looking much like a crayfish – that had menaced one of my exploration probes far, far out on the extreme frontiers of the space I had explored… in fact, in a star system that another species had claimed, so I really had no use for that system – for example, there was no prospect of building a refueling station there. So my Second Fleet went roaring out there… which took quite some time… and, as the time passed, I began to get notifications that each of the ships was running out of fuel. The Fleet entered the system with bare traces of fuel left, easily killed the offending varmint, and proudly began drifting. So, in a universe that my civilization had just discovered to be inhabited and dangerous, four fifths of my armed forces had just chosen to scrap themselves on their own initiative. The funniest part was that my form of government was representative democracy, which left me wondering what I could possibly have said as the chief executive if the press had asked me about this.