#^d 2016-07-10 #^h Weekend Roundup

The biggest story in the US last week involved the fatal shootings of seven people in three separate incidents: one each in Louisiana and Minnesota (Alton Sterling and Philando Castile), and five in Dallas. All of the shootings involved police and race, and appear to be unjustifiable by any conceivable criteria. Needless to say, they all involved guns, but one thing they had in common point been little commented on: all eight victims were armed, and their guns worthless for self-defense. (Remind me again how safe we would all be if everyone had guns for self-defense.) As a practical matter, carrying guns not only failed to save the victims, but probably contributed to their deaths. The Louisiana and Minnesota incidents may have occurred because police panicked when they discovered that the black people they were harrassing were armed. The Texas incident came later, when an ex-army soldier snapped and decided to shoot some white police -- perhaps as indiscriminate revenge (isn't that how he was trained to respond to "the enemy" in Afghanistan?), the sort of warped injustice self-appointed vigilantes are prone to.

For some time now, I've felt that as long as people legimately believe that they need to own and carry a gun for their own protection it would be unwise and unfair for government to deny them that option. However, I've always wondered whether carrying a gun actually made anyone safer: has anyone ever studied this, putting such (probably rare) events in statistical context against all the other things that can go wrong with guns?

There are other ways one can approach these tragic events. One I think should be given more weight is that the Dallas shooter learned his craft in the US military, which no doubt considered him a hero until the moment he started shooting at white American cops. Not all killers were trained by the US military, but they do pop up with some frequency. I'm reminded of a scene in Full Metal Jacket where the Marine Gunnery Sergeant lectures his boot camp trainees on "what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do," offering a few examples: Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Whitman, Richard Speck. Should we be surprised that a country that is so invested in celebrating its heroic killers abroad should more than occasionally encounter the same at home? And not infrequently by the same hands?

Of course, another way to approach this is to note that last week's bombing in Baghdad killed over 175 -- more than twenty times the death toll discussed above. But that scarcely registers here, even though the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq is still most responsible for continued bloodshed there. As bad as gun violence has become here, it still pales against the violence of US forces and the rivals they stir up abroad.

I suppose the second biggest story last week was the FBI decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for risking classified data by running a private email server while she was Secretary of State. FBI Director Comey went out of his way to scold Clinton for being "extremely careless" regarding state secrets before admitting that they couldn't come up with a credible criminal case against her. The way Comey put it allowed Republicans to reiterate their talking points, adding they couldn't understand the decision not to indict based on Comey's exposition.

As I understand the "scandal" (see Wikipedia for a long rundown, and perhaps also Clinton's own The Facts About Hillary Clinton's Emails [PS: broken link]), the problem with running a non-government server is that it doesn't allow for efficient collection of emails that are considered to be public records (under the Federal Records Act). To comply with the FRA, Clinton had to sort through her emails and turn over the ones she considered to be State Department business while retaining ones she considered to be personal -- i.e., the two had been mixed. A better solution might have been to turn all the emails over and let the Department sort out which ones were personal -- at least then she couldn't be accused of hiding emails that should have gone into the public record. On the other hand, had she kept separate public and private email accounts, there still would likely have been cross-contamination. (There is a similar controversy here in Kansas, where a member of Gov. Sam Brownback's staff was found to be communicating with lobbyists via his personal account, thereby avoiding public records disclosure.)

Still, one wonders why the FRA issue didn't arise while Clinton was actually Secretary of State. It only seems to have been recognized as a problem several years after she left office, when the Republican Benghazi! witchhunt got under way. Further complicating things is the question of whether Clinton's emails contained classified material. Clinton, of course, had a top security clearance, but her private email server wasn't fully secured for handling "secret" missives, so it could have been, well, I'm not sure what, some form of breach in the security state. Again, this seems not to have bothered anyone until well after the fact. And curiously, the audits revealed that some emails contained material that was classified only after it was sent, so most of this charade has been focused on Clinton's threat to national security. Frankly, I'd respect her more if she had been a source of leaked data. But all this episode really shows is her knack for getting caught up in trivial scandals.

I'd be happy to never hear of the email matter again, but there's little chance of that. Instead, I expect the Republicans to flog the matter on and on, much as they did every conjured taint from Whitewater to Benghazi, even though their complaints will fail to impress anyone but themselves, and in the end prove counterproductive. In particular, those of us who consider Hillary at best a lesser evil will wonder why they don't attack her with something she's truly guilty of, like voting for Bush's Iraq War.

Some scattered links this week: