Steve Sailer writes: …the Washington Post ran a trial balloon claiming that Hillary intended to run in the fall on immigration expansion and gun control.
Looking at the 2012 electoral college map, that looks even more suicidal than it originally sounded. The Democrats prospered in 2012 by carrying almost all of the heavily wooded Rust Belt Great Lakes states where deer hunting is a big part of the culture, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
* My wife and I once had an employee who lived in a heavily black area some distance away (he’s black). His house was invaded by two black male criminals. He happened to be a gun owner (and former military), so he fired shots at them. He nicked at least one of them and they fled (they were later arrested at a hospital). The cop who took the employee’s statement at the end said to him, “I wish you hadn’t missed. Now we have to deal with ‘em through the justice system.”
That’s usually a common sentiment with a lot of rank-and-file cops; they sort-of secretly high-five each other when they find that a courageous citizen had defended himself or herself and dispatched the perps to their makers. And, of course, notwithstanding all this talk about racist cops gunning down (black) criminals, interviews with criminals demonstrate time and again that they are far more fearful of armed citizens than they are of police officers, from whom they expect restraint. Convicts who are interviewed about the subject are invariably for gun control.
* “Within broad rounding errors, what percentage of U.S. voters hunt? Six percent maybe? Probably less. I doubt the 2016 election is going to be decided by hunters.”
You don’t seem to understand how politics works. First of all, a majority of eligible voters don’t vote. Then there is a sizable majority among voters who consistently vote for one party or the other no matter what. When you do some math-by-dissection of the electorate, the “swing voters” are actually quite few, only a small single digit percentage.
Hunters are actually a diverse lot, in political terms – everyone from a wealthy Republican businessman who like to shoot exotic game to Joe Six-Pack union card holder who hunts deer on public land.
The hunter/shooter lobby may comprise only a small segment of the electorate, but when it is mobilized it punches far above its weight. Guns and hunting are a VERY emotional, cultural issue for such people – they go almost “rabid” politically when their beloved tradition is threatened. I know – I am one of them.
* ctual risk, are mass shootings by men with scary rifles. More on point to politics, another symbolic cultural issue to bash core America is something that won’t soon get old for the Democrats. (Look for arguments that we’ll need to take away guns from all those “racist Trump supporters who might revolt if he loses.”) I will concede that a live question exists as to whether this issue will hype up the Democrat base more than it will piss off white males in states the Democrats need to win, and I will also concede that the history of gun control makes for a great example of the difference between intensity of interest versus breadth of interest in an issue (gun control has been a loser for the Democrats since the 1990s in part because gun rights supporters who are invested in the issue enough to vote over it have outnumbered gun control supporters who are).
The real issue over guns right now is the future makeup of the Supreme Court. DC v. Heller (the 2008 Supreme Court case that found that the Second Amendment was an individual right) was a 5-4 decision penned by Scalia, who was the Justice most intellectually and personally invested in the issue. He’s gone now, and the Democrats have been signaling ever since the decision that they regard it as a rogue decision overturning “70 years of precedent” (which is false, but nonetheless), and it’s near to a certainty that any Clinton nominee to the Court would not vote to expand or further apply Heller’s individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, and would vote to overturn Heller if given the chance to do so. This may or may not matter depending on where you live, but in some places (e.g., California, whose legislature may very well ban all semi-auto rifles this year), a future Constitutional challenge would be the only thing standing in the way of expansive gun control.
* Beginning in the 1960s, liberals began to attack the criminal justice system because they felt it disparately punished minorities. Before that time, criminal cases that had been tried in state courts very rarely were appealed to Federal courts. Then, all of a sudden, they started to be, and very often. Capital cases, in particular, began to go regularly all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. This litigation resulted in procedural changes such as the constant application of the exclusionary rule (the policeman makes a mistake, so the criminal goes free), the advent of the Miranda warning, and the restriction of the death penalty to cases of aggravated murder (Furman v. Georgia, 432 U.S. 238, consolidated with Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas). Recall that before this period, even the state of New York, for example, had a mandatory death penalty for first-degree murder, including “felony murder” (homicide committed during the course of another felony, e.g., an armed robbery). Many states provided the death penalty for rape, arson, train-wrecking, and a few even for burglary. Liberal judges swept all this away.
These developments coincided with a rising rate of violent crime, and also with race riots and general urban decay. The movie Death Wish (1974) was a product of this era. There was a widespread perception that liberals were “soft on crime.”
The Left’s infatuation with gun control was, first, an effort to respond to that charge, enabling urban Democrats to claim that this was how they were going to be “tough on crime,” without, however, suggesting that they were going to punish actual criminals. That would be self-defeating, since it would involve locking up or executing members of their constituencies, particularly blacks.
The gun control push quickly aroused the NRA, and later led to repeated defeats for liberal politicians outside of a handful of urban constituencies. I believe that the left has since then pressed for gun control less out of a desire to take handguns away from urban blacks than from the desire to hurt the suburban and rural white males that have handed them so many defeats over the gun issue.
You’ll note that Hillary promises she’ll “take on the NRA” – there’s no mention of urban violence at all. These days, it’s all about political revenge against those “bitter clingers.” Statistical rarities like the Colorado theatre shooting are trotted out, and blamed on the “gun lobby” instead of on the near-impossibility of committing the dangerously insane to the loony bin, where they belong. The black-on-black slaughter in places like Chicago is never mentioned – and I’m sure that politicians like Hillary Clinton or Chuck Schumer have no realistic expectation that their anti-gun measures will make a particle of difference to it.
* The, err, ‘gun nuts’ will be highly motivated to vote this election. If you weren’t aware of it, there have been severe shortages in both ammo, and reloading components, due to the last two presidential elections. Some of these shortages are still not fully resolved.
* In the Tamir Rice case, I seem to remember it was heavily implied cops should have known better than to shoot a boy with a toy gun.
However, I learn today that nearly everyone from toddlers to adults can fail to accurately distinguish toy guns from real guns, loaded guns from unloaded ones, in the New York Times, no less:
One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves.
Holston, Kiyan, Za’veon and Sha’Quille, RIP.
* Hillary is vulnerable on so many fronts.
Trump will destroy her in debates.
Words cannot describe how much I am looking forward to the debates.
* I did a marketing research project for the Z Channel in 1982 when I was at UCLA, modeling what kind of Nielsen ratings they’d get for different movies.
As for Italians and movie-making … the Romans were into theater and professional sports on a massive scale, and Ancient culture survived better in Italy than elsewhere. The Italians invented opera (around 1600) and other forms of entertainment (e.g., Shakespeare’s default was to set his plays in Italy because it was the most glamorous country in his day).
The Italians got into movie-making early and were possibly ahead of the Americans until “Birth of a Nation” in 1915.
My vague impression is that American GIs came back from fighting in Italy in 1943-45 liking Italian culture, which rich New England WASPs had been promoting since the late 19th Century.
Italian movies were a glamorous part of young adult American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. American movies got kind of stodgy in the 1960s, while Italian movies were cooler. I’ve been slowly watching Italian movies from that era on Netflix, and I can imagine my later father-in-law and mother-in-law in Chicago getting a sitter for the evening and going to a Sophia Loren movie.
I finally saw Bertolucci’s 1970 movie “The Conformist” and that just has style to burn. It probably had a huge confidence-building impact on young Italian-American guys in the movie business like Coppola, Scorsese, and Cimino.
The 1960s, with their northern European nature worship, weren’t really comfortable for Italian-Americans (who’d been feeling on top in the Sinatra Era of the 1950s), but they got their mojo back in the 1970s.
My guess is that the beginning of jet airliner service between New York and London at the end of 1958 tipped the 1960s toward Anglo-Irish ideas of cool (e.g., the Beatles). The Brits won the Big One, but then they were broke in the immediate postwar era. so their sons finally got a victory lap in the 1960s-1970 (e.g., the Who at Woodstock sound like the RAF over Dresden).
It took the Italians a while to recover from the weirdness of the 1960s, but then their ancient sense of style reasserted itself in the 1970s.
* There are very few hunters in California in part because there isn’t a lot of vegetation for deer to eat. But then the Republicans haven’t won California since 1988 and are unlikely to start again in 2016.
But there are a lot of deer hunters in the states that Democrats have been winning narrowly in recent elections.
My guess is that that Hillary will abandon insulting hunters when somebody points this out to her.
* My sister in law does the hiring for a doctors office in Maryland. She interviewed a black male for a job, liked him and wanted to hire him. She did the background check and it came back with a illegal gun possession charge and decided not offer. She mentioned this to a black male friend of hers. He said in Baltimore everyone carries a gun. You’d be crazy not to. They hired him, he seems to be working out.
* My take of the Left and guns is that it is one issue where the pubic is vastly more informed than the pols and their handlers. Depending upon who is doing the counting, half of American homes have a gun. About 90% of adults in America know someone who is a gun enthusiast. The result is the blather that comes from the Left is easily verified and disputed. Because the claims are so stupid most of the time, the Lefty pol talking guns ends up sounding like an idiot.
I’ve sat at a meal dozens of time where a lefty will start yapping about guns, only to have someone politely eviscerate their claims and make them look like a fool. Since Progressivism is almost entirely about the pose now, a topic that makes the adherent look foolish is not a topic they want to discuss. Some of the true believers when in their coven will rattle on about guns, but in the wild it is just a disaster for them on theological grounds.
* Yesterday’s NYT article about the death toll from toddlers shooting themselves and others with their parent’s pistols can be viewed as battle space prep, as the NYT informally coordinates with the Hillary campaign.
It also indicates that the crafty Hillary won’t make the rifle mistake.
My guess would be a proposal for some kind of law that requires new pistols to be impossible to fire except by the owner. Unless you are wearing a magic ring or your fingerprints match or something, pulling the trigger won’t do anything. This way grabbing a cop’s pistol wouldn’t work either, a stolen pistol would be useless, etc. I’m sure that this would be completely impractical (it would reduce the reliability of guns while raising the cost) but it’s the kind of techie solution that would appeal to suburban whites, like pollution controls on cars. You have a fingerprint sensor on your iPhone so why not on guns?
With this proposal, Hillary could appease the “gun control” constituencies in her party, come off as pragmatic (“I’m not proposing something that will never get passed anyway”) and not alienate swing voters.
* If whites ever want to buy cheaper housing, or get their costs down by putting their kids back into decent public schools instead of expensive private schools, or get rid of their hour-long commutes to work, they’ll have to disarm blacks and/or kick them out of US cities. Yes, white liberals are very concerned about blacks with guns. They also know that every time one black kills another black with a gun, it makes their whole ‘only whites are evil’ narrative look phony. You can’t use blacks as a wedge issue against conservatives if blacks keep going against Saint Black story, and you can’t get blacks to back your politics if you tell them they’re just a bunch of sociopaths. Disarming blacks is the only way liberals have of taming blacks yet still keep black political support.
* First it was
He can’t lead the polls
He can’t win Iowa
He can’t win evangelicals
He can’t win the northeast
He can’t win the primary
Now it’s he can’t beat Hillary.
After Inauguration Day it’ll be
He can’t build the wall.
He can’t deport 20 million people
He cant bring back all the jobs
He can’t leave NAFTA
He can’t put colonies on the Moon
* While I agree that the gun control issue (as well as the immigration issue) certainly doesn’t seem to work in Hillary’s favor, the question is: what issue would work in her favor?
The sorts of issues that Democrats have always run against Republicans have almost all been taken off the table by Trump. She can’t pretend that she’s on the side of the workers economically when Trump defends entitlements and it is she who is in the pocket of the banks — there’s not going to be any hugely damaging 47% remark coming out of Trump. She can’t pretend that it is she who will avoid stupid wars when it is she who has supported them. Even the feminism/misogyny angle isn’t much of a win for her when it is an opportunity for Trump to bring up her own enabling of Bill’s predations.
So what’s left for her?
She really has to attack him personally as wild, unthinking, and reckless to make any real headway.
And of course there’s a real question as to whether Trump can in fact control himself enough to reduce the damage of such an attack.
* I think the answer is that Italian culture is very visual/pictoral. Compare the Italian Renaissance to just about any other geo-cultural event. The Italian Renaissance had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and dozens of others whose names are less well remembered. It was a one-time assemblage of pictorial genius that never happened again. Even their cultural antecedents in classical Greece and Rome included sculptural and pictorial art that is still unparalleled.
The English had the Elizabethans, but they most wrote stuff: poetry and plays. The French and Germans had philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. The Russians had great literature but the pictoral art never really broke free of its religious iconographic roots. The low countries’ “Northern Renaissance” was great, but the calm landscapes and serene interiors just don’t make for action-packed moving pictures. When movies came along, it was natural that the Italians would be all over that.
Heck, even when Italians talk, you need to have a visual to get the full sense of it. With an Englishman, hearing the voice is enough, seeing the speaker doesn’t add much. With an Italian, everything is visible and everything is in motion.
* Gun control is as good a proxy as there is for Hillary’s real adversary, white men. Being white herself, she will have a much harder time pulling the race card than Obama and ginning up the war on women meme only appeals one half of the electorate. Heeding Napoleon’s advice, it is much better not to divide her forces, especially now that she has go on the attack. Gun control is the demagogic message that she will use to unite her “diverse” coalition against the one thing they all hate the most but cannot openly say it.
What Trump needs to do is disrupt her message.
* Are you suggesting that avid supporters of gun control, ignoring a steadily increasing accumulation of evidence and research that gun control has no impact on crime or possibly even increases crime rates, are not engaged in VERY emotional thinking? And based on my observation of voters I know– particularly those who identify as some form of “progressive” or yellow dog dimocrat — I’d suggest that you are grotesquely over-estimating the proportion of voters in this country who ponder their ballot choices like Platonic philosopher kings.
* Just to tie together a couple points that come up in this thread, I think that what most characterizes Trump — and, on the other hand, a lot of Italians in cinema and elsewhere — is the motormouth phenomenon.
There are certain people — I’d guess particularly among Italians — who simply can’t stop talking. If they are also of well above average intelligence, they can be, and typically are, quite charming. Trump is obviously such a person. I’d say that among Italians in the cinema, Scorcese, Joe Pesci, and Roberto Benigni are emblematic of the type — outside the cinema, I’d say that Scalia and Giamatti at Yale had more than a touch of it.
Generally, motormouths, for all their charm, don’t make it far in politics, for obvious reasons. Every word is a potential bombshell in politics, and they generate words like mad.
No doubt Trump’s success to date as a politician owes in no small part to his having been able to come in from on top, and having avoided the usual process of politics beneath the Presidential level which grinds down or out anything that isn’t already meally.
The thing is, I don’t think motormouths can do much to control themselves, even when the stakes are high — it runs too much against their nature.
How this will play out for Trump I just don’t know.
One thing Trump has going in his favor is that his motormouth talent could actually serve to implement a standard technique in psychotherapy: flooding. So-called flooding is a method used to treat phobias. If you’re afraid of heights, say, it will involve you exposing yourself to ever increasingly “scary” situations with heights until you no longer experience the fear: it’s been flooded out by all the exposures.
Trump is effectively doing this for many of the issues that our culture considers taboo. The more Trump comes out and openly criticizes and mocks cultural taboos, the less the public feels the impact of an invocation of a taboo to shut him and others down. He could single-handedly create the new normal they keep bringing up.
It should be a fun ride. We do indeed live in interesting times.
* Democrats are all about disarming White men and allowing Black criminals to rob without risk. That’s the whole point of gun control. Removing the ability and right to self defense. ESPECIALLY to Black criminals. If Dems wanted to disarm Black criminals existing gun laws make that very easy — paroled felons have no right to them and checks can allow the feds when they want to imprison the ex felons found with guns. This happens very rarely in concentrated anti-gang sweeps.
Hillary figures anti-White male stuff is just the ticket to suburban soccer moms who really, really HATE HATE HATE White working class men and beta males alike. It is all identity politics, and is likely polling well enough for Hillary to use it — along with mass third world immigration.
Gun ownership ballooned up as Liberal soft-on-Black-Voter-crime policies aligned with mass Third World immigration into the US; prior to both say from 1920-1960 gun ownership was not an issue for either party and was routine even in cities save NYC which was a Teddy Rooosevelt pioneer in that respect — TR got gun restrictions passed in the late 19th Century. Every other place it was a non issue and gun ownership declined. Owning a gun is essentially a bet that the State will fail to protect yourself or family; a good bet with globalized labor movement and protected status for Black voters with relatives who commit disproportionate amount of crimes.
Most middle to upper class women figure “a real Alpha” would not “need a gun” to protect against that contingency and that NAMs are sainted figures anyway, so gun control is part of Hillary’s “Woman Card” politics. Indeed you could argue Democrats cater to female perceptions that only “real Alphas” those 5-10% of top men count, and the rest are disposable.
It is understandable why — consumer marketing has followed this line since the 1970s.
