Via TPM:
A man shot himself in the leg Tuesday while bowling in Jupiter, Fla.
According to TV station WPBF, witnesses said the man was carrying a revolver in the pocket of his shorts. The gun was triggered when he hit his leg while throwing a bowling ball.
He was subsequently taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life threatening.
In his defense, maybe he once got mugged in an alley.
Following up on yesterday’s post about the folks who plan on marching into Washington, D.C. on the Fourth of July carrying guns:
The District of Columbia’s police chief said Tuesday officers would arrest marchers who plan to openly carry rifles into the city in violation of District law.
“Passing into the District of Columbia with loaded firearms is a violation of the law and we’ll have to treat it as such,” Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier said…
As commenter Lobotomy noted, this march is a win-win for the gun nuts. They get arrested, TYRANNY REIGNS! and their point is proved. If they get ignored, then they will say that they scared the evil government into submission. FREEDOM!
It’s not about guns, it’s not about the law, it’s about getting their message on TV and rolling around in their fifteen minutes. The problem is that all it takes is one person to go over the edge and start shooting, and then you have a silly pecker contest turned into a brawl and people getting injured or killed.
HT to ntodd.
Volcano eruption in the Philippines kills five.
Sexual assaults in the military topped 26,000 in 2012.
Immigration bill faces hundreds of amendments.
Background check bill may get another shot.
Mark Sanford goes back to Congress.
The Dow closed over 15,000 for the first time ever.
R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen, Hollywood master of stop-motion photography.
The Tigers got rained out in Washington.
A group of pro-gun folk are planning a march on Washington on the Fourth of July to basically dare the police to arrest them for carrying weapons into the city where open carrying is illegal.
Adam Kokesh, 31, is planning a July 4 rally of pro-gun activists openly carrying rifles from Virginia to Washington as an act of “civil disobedience.” The plan, according to his Facebook event page, is to march across Memorial Bridge with rifles loaded and slung across the back “to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated [and] cower in submission to tyranny.”
The invite continues, stating, ” … This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent.”
Kokesh writes that if 10,000 attendees RSVP by June 1st, “we have the critical mass necessary to pull this off.” He said he wants to have at least 1,000 actually marching in the event, and as of this writing, more than 1,400 have said they were going.
I’m sure that they are hoping for a confrontation with the cops so that they can claim that they’re being oppressed by tyranny. (It’s always the same thing with some people. Can’t get an extra order of fries with your Happy Meal? TYRANNY!)
Ed Kilgore’s take on this is that it’s an attempt to intimidate the people they think are intimidating them.
But even if no violence ensues, this exercise is actually typical of an awful lot of the stockpiling-guns-to-resist-tyranny talk on the Right (and on rare occasions, the Left) these days. It’s actually the inverse of what Kokesh says: it’s an effort to intimidate political opponents with the threat, if not the immediate actuality, of violence. Otherwise, what’s the point of carrying guns to your nonviolent protest? The point, it seems clear, is to make extraconstitutional claims for the legitimacy of the “constitutional” protests against Big Government.
Or, as Dr. Freud would put it, “Nice gun. Sorry about your small dick.”
The best thing the DC police could do would be to ignore them. You want to march? Fine. Don’t block traffic and don’t litter. Yawn.
One of the bright ideas to emerge from the recently-concluded NRA convention in Houston was for parents to store their guns in their kids’ room.
The course was taught by Rob Pincus, who owns the popular firearm instruction company I.C.E. Training. Pincus argued that, in the event of a home invasion, parents would instinctually run to their children’s room anyway, they might as well have a gun stored there to kill two birds with one stone.
“Kill” being not the best choice of words here.
A 2-year-old Kentucky girl was accidentally killed by her 5-year-old brother who fired a rifle he had been given as a gift, officials said Wednesday.
Cumberland County Coroner Gary L. White said an autopsy of Caroline Starks showed the toddler had died from a single shot from the .22-caliber rifle. The death has been ruled accidental and no charges will be filed, he said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“Most everybody in town is pretty devastated by this,” White said. “Nobody wants to take anyone’s guns away, but you’ve got to keep them out of harm’s way for the kids. It’s a safety issue.”
The girl, Caroline Starks, was in her Burkesville, Ky., home when her brother fired the rifle he had been given as a birthday present about 1 p.m. Tuesday. The mother had just stepped outside the house for a moment, White said. The child was pronounced dead at Cumberland County Hospital.
The rifle used in the accident is a Crickett designed for children and sold under the slogan “My First Rifle,” according to the company’s website. It is a smaller weapon designed for children and comes with a shoulder stock in child-like colors including pink and swirls.
Marketing real guns for kids is along the same lines as putting Jack Daniel’s in a sippy cup so that kids can learn early on the joys of drinking and that just a little snort every so often — if done in moderation — is actually going to teach them how not to get shitfaced. Because kids know all there is to know about self-control.
My guess is that these people who are in favor of storing guns in their kids’ bedrooms are violently opposed to giving away condoms to high school kids or allowing 15-year-olds to get the morning-after pill because that will only teach them to have sex. Just a hunch.
By the way, if anyone thought the NRA might back off from its reactionary and wingnutsery stands after Newtown and the fact that 9 out of 10 people in the country are in favor of universal background checks and restrictions on gun clips, they are proceeding from a false assumption. The new president of the NRA, Jim Porter of Birmingham, Alabama, is an unreconstructed gun nut who claims that Barack Obama is a “fake president” and that the Civil War was really “The War of Northern Aggression,” a term used mainly by the Klan.
Mr. Porter is also an attorney who has spent a lot of time defending gun manufacturers from lawsuits, so any pretense that the NRA is just a group of gun enthusiasts and isn’t a cover for the arms dealers is pretty well shot to hell, so to speak.
Not the First — Long before Jason Collins came out, there was Glenn Burke. Allen Barra in The Atlantic tells the story of the first major league out gay baseball player.
A few months back, the Baltimore Ravens’ Brendon Ayanbadejo, an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights, told USA Today that he thought the first player in the three major sports to out himself would be a baseball player: “The religious roots are a lot deeper in basketball and football. With that being said, I think baseball players are more open-minded.”
What Ayanbadejo didn’t know was that one baseball player already had. This week’s coming out by NBA player Jason Collins is momentous, but the Jackie Robinson of gay rights was Glenn Burke, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland A’s from 1976 to 1979. He tried to change sports culture three decades ago—but back then, unlike now, sports culture wasn’t ready for a change.
Burke made no secret of his sexual orientation to the Dodgers front office, his teammates, or friends in either league. He also talked freely with sportswriters, though all of them ended up shaking their heads and telling him they couldn’t write that in their papers. Burke was so open about his sexuality that the Dodgers tried to talk him into participating in a sham marriage. (He wrote in his autobiography that the team offered him $75,000 to go along with the ruse.) He refused. In a bit of irony that would seem farcical if it wasn’t so tragic, one of the Dodgers who tried to talk Burke into getting “married,” was his manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose son Tom Jr. died from AIDS complications in 1991. To this day, Lasorda Sr. refuses to acknowledge his son’s homosexuality.
Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke’s former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.
He told People magazine while promoting his book in 1995, “My mission as a gay ballplayer was the breaking of a stereotype … I think it worked … They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it.”
And yet Burke is remembered less today as a pioneer for gay rights and more as the man who, along with Dusty Baker, invented the “high five.”
The media in general and the sports media in particular found Burke’s homosexuality an inconvenient truth. He told People, “I think everyone just pretended not to hear me. It just wasn’t a story they were ready to hear.”
Eighteen years later they still haven’t heard him.
It’s His Problem — Andrew O’Hehir on President Obama’s cowardice at Gitmo.
So it is that Obama, more than four years after signing an executive order to shut down the Guantánamo prison, found himself a few days ago mumbling defensively to the White House press corps that it might be time to “re-engage with Congress” on the issue. “It is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantánamo,” he added. Well, it freakin’ well shouldn’t be, Mr. President. From the moment Obama became a presidential candidate in 2007, he campaigned vigorously against Guantánamo as a pillar of the flawed and failed Bush-Cheney war policy. He won the election and signed that executive order in his third day on the job, and then – once it became clear that House Republicans would be delighted to use the issue to depict him as a crypto-Muslim, terrorist-coddling pantywaist – let the whole thing drop. The rest of us, I’m afraid, mostly assumed that the right guy was in office and the right thing would be done eventually, and moved on.
But decisions made in the name of political expediency have a tendency to come back and bite you in the ass. (If Machiavelli never said that, he should have.) As the Economist put it this week, the current hunger strike at Guantánamo, which began as a small dissent movement in February and now includes most of the camp’s detainees, has shamed Obama and forced America and the world to face “one of his most glaring failures.” Military officials admit that 100 of the 166 Guantánamo prisoners are now refusing food, while lawyers and activists in contact with the detainees say the real number is closer to 130. At least 23 men in the camp are reportedly being strapped into a chair twice a day and force-fed Ensure nutritional supplement — through a plastic tube passed through the nose and into the stomach – in order to keep them alive. Three to five others in more serious condition have apparently been hospitalized. (The Miami Herald has an online chart showing the progress of the strike, using the official statistics.)
How many of these detainees, who’ve decided they’d rather die than face indefinite imprisonment with no prospect of either release or trial, are dedicated al-Qaida extremists? It’s obviously a loaded question, and I suppose the real answer is that no one knows. But here’s what we do know: Of the 166 prisoners still at Guantánamo, 86 have been officially cleared for release, either to their home countries or somewhere else. In fact, many of those were designated for release years ago, under the Bush administration, and they are still locked up. There’s nothing close to an adequate explanation for that fact, but we can evidently blame a combination of bureaucratic inertia, excessive caution and the fact that almost no one gives a crap about a few dozen Arab and/or Muslim men who used to be suspected terrorists and now constitute a national embarrassment.
They Ain’t Cheap — Andy Borowitz reports on the N.R.A’s budget woes.
National Rifle Association C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre used his opening speech at the N.R.A.’s national convention today to highlight several challenges facing the organization, including what he called “the rising cost of Senators.”
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen the price of purchasing a Senator surge astronomically,” he told the N.R.A. faithful. “Unless something is done to make Senators more affordable, the ability of a tiny lobbying group to overrule the wishes of ninety per cent of the American people will be in jeopardy.”
The days are over, he said, when “you could buy a Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for little more than pocket change.”
“Now it costs thousands to purchase a marginally effective Senator like Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.),” he said.
Mr. LaPierre was followed at the podium by the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the rock musician Ted Nugent, and several other people who would not pass background checks.
Doonesbury — Grade deflation.
Turns out that voting lockstep with the NRA and against your constituents’ wishes has consequences.
New PPP polls in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio find serious backlash against the 5 Senators who voted against background checks in those states. Each of them has seen their approval numbers decline, and voters say they’re less likely to support them the next time they’re up for reelection. That’s no surprise given that we continue to find overwhelming, bipartisan support for background checks in these states.
For example:
-After just 3 months in office Jeff Flake has already become one of the most unpopular Senators in the country. Just 32% of voters approve of him to 51% who disapprove and that -19 net approval rating makes him the most unpopular sitting Senator we’ve polled on, taking that label from Mitch McConnell.
70% of Arizona voters support background checks to only 26% who are opposed to them. That includes 92/6 favor from Democrats, 71/24 from independents, and 50/44 from Republicans. 52% of voters say they’re less likely to support Flake in a future election because of this vote, compared to only 19% who say they’re more likely to. Additionally voters say by a 21 point margin, 45/24, that they trust senior colleague John McCain more than Flake when it comes to gun issues.
Part of that fall-off might also have to do with the fact that Mr. Flake penned a handwritten letter to the mother of a victim of the shooting in Aurora last summer and said he was with her on background checks, then voted against them. People remember shit like that.
Granted, Mr. Flake is five months into his term and as he himself noted, he isn’t up for re-election until 2018. He’s either planning on redeeming himself in the eyes of the world, or he’s counting on the voters’ short memory. (Cynic that I am, I believe the latter.) But as the poll shows, voters do take note, and there will be plenty of time to remind them between now and then.
Cartoonists want to draw your attention to putting an end to gun violence.
HT to Richard K. Barry at The Reaction.
The Boston bomber will be tried as a civilian, much to the chagrin of the butch tough guys who think that the Constitution only exists to protect the right to own a howitzer.
The Boston bombing suspect will be tried as a criminal and not an “enemy combatant,” Obama administration officials told The Associated Press on Monday.
Word from the White House came moments after CBS News learned that 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had officially been charged with helping execute the attack on the Boston Marathon that killed three and left over 180 injured.The first charge is conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, the AP noted, which carries a potential death sentence. He’s likely to also face multiple counts of murder and attempted murder, both of which carry potential life sentences.“Today’s charges bring a successful end to a tragic week for the city of Boston and for our country,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a prepared statement.
Prominent conservatives have in recent days advocated that Tsarnaev be subjected to all manner of treatment, from facing a military tribunal to even being tortured or lynched in public.
During a hearing held in his hospital room, a magistrate informed Mr. Tsarnaev of the charges against him and of his rights under the Constitution, including his right to remain silent and his right to an attorney. In other words, he’ll be treated to the same level of justice that has dealt with every other domestic terrorist that we’ve captured in recent history, all of whom were found guilty and are either serving their sentence in a federal maximum security prison or, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh, were executed.
Funny how the people who scream the most about the rule of law and will defend the Constitution (or at least certain amendments) within an inch of its life, don’t really seem to trust it very much.
Via Think Progress:
Shortly before the a crucial Senate vote to expand background checks in gun transactions, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) sent a letter to the mother of a shooting victim claiming that he was “truly sorry” for her son’s death and that “strengthening background checks is something we agree on.” A few days later, he voted to kill the background checks bill.
What, you thought he would actually vote for it even though he said he agreed with it? Really? Hey, I have some nice waterfront property in Tucson that I’d like you to see. Ocean view and everything.
Neither of the suspects in the Boston bombing had gun permits.
Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas tells The Associated Press in an interview Sunday that neither Tamerlan Tsarnaev (tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) nor his brother Dzhokhar had permission to carry firearms.
He says it’s unclear whether either ever applied and the applications aren’t considered public records.
But he says the 19-year-old Dzhokhar (joh-KHAR’) would have been denied a permit because of his age. Only people 21 or older are allowed gun licenses in Massachusetts.
This will now become the standard boilerplate of the NRA and every gun-rights supporter for the next ten years or so: gun control doesn’t work, so why have it?
Bonus: Andy Borowitz on the courageous senators who stood up to the American people.
Jon Stewart looks at how the Senate deals with guns and crime.
Well, thank God for Chris Hayes, because I’m not good at math. I’m so stupid. I still think 54 votes is more than 46, because I’m a f**king idiot. But I’m pretty sure that a million is more than 3,400, and yet, to battle the evil of terror, we started two wars, tortured people, reorganized almost the entire federal government, disallowed the air trafficking of shampoo and conditioner and okay’d the robot sky killing of American citizens, if warranted by… someone.
Because one American life lost to terror is one too many, which I agree with. But it seems to me we’ll move heaven and earth to do whatever it takes to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of foreigners who might kill our citizens, because apparently we think killing our citizens, is our job.
Via C&L.
The four Democrats in the Senate (Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Mark Pryor, and Heidi Heitkamp) who voted against background checks in the gun bill in the Senate explain why.
It’s pretty much what you’d expect: either they’re up for a tough re-election fight next year and they’re afraid of the NRA. One — Mark Begich of Alaska — mumbled something about not wanting to get caught up in an “an emotional moment” (where was this guy when the Senate whooped through the USA PATRIOT Act?).
But noticeably, none of the reasons have anything to do with actually doing something about gun violence.
Britain and France tell the U.N. that Syria has used chemical weapons.
Death toll at the Texas fertilizer plant explosion is believed to be 15.
Gun bill is basically toast.
Among other things, the man who mailed the ricin to President Obama is an Elvis impersonator.
Telescopes spot planets that are in the “Goldilocks” zone.
The Tigers lost to the Mariners 2-0.
Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has an editorial in the New York Times on the Senate’s failure to enact gun legislation.
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.
Amen.
Headline from TPM:
From the Washington Post:
As the Senate began voting Wednesday on nine proposed changes to a gun control bill, the centerpiece proposal on background checks quickly failed to win enough support, despite broad public backing.
The vote on the so-called Manchin-Toomey amendment was 54 in favor, 46 against — failing to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to move ahead. Four Republicans supported it, and four Democrats voted no.
The raw emotion of the defeat played out in the Senate gallery just after Vice President Biden read the vote count.
“Shame on you!” at least two women were heard shouting.
As they were escorted from the Capitol, Patricia Maisch and Lori Haas said they shouted in anger. Maisch successfully knocked a large ammunition magazine out of the hands of Jared Loughner in Jan. 2011 after he shot former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and other bystanders.
“They are an embarrassment to this country, that they don’t have any compassion or care for people who have been taken brutally from their families,” Maisch said as officers attempted to remove her from the building. “I hate them,” she said of the senators.
“We’re sick and tired of the death in this country and these legislators stand up there and think it’s a bunch of numbers,” said Haas, whose daughter, Emily, was wounded in the April 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech.
“It’s a shame, it’s appalling, it’s disgusting,” she added.
Yeah. What she said.
President Obama was not pleased with the outcome.
Last week I suggested that if the gun bill makes it through the Senate, it will be so watered down as to be less than useless.
A large alliance of gun owners announced Sunday it supports the bipartisan compromise on gun sale background checks that senators announced last week.
The chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Alan Gottlieb, sent a message to members and contributors stating the bill “bans any federal gun registry and carries a 15-year prison term for anyone who violates it.”
“We protect and expand a good number of pro-gun rights measures as well,” Gottlieb continued, noting he and one of the group’s lobbyists had helped craft the deal. He cited measures like making interstate gun sales easier, and restoring gun rights to veterans, as reasons for his group’s support.
This bill, if it gets through the House and gets signed by the president, will not only be a sop to the gun lobby and make no dent whatsoever in the illegal sales of guns, it will prevent any future laws from being enacted because it will become the model for any further attempts to control them.
So after another school massacre and another round of national mourning and soul-searching and piteous cries to do something, our cowardly elected officials will point to this bill and say, “See, we did the best we could and it didn’t stop the madness.” And we’ll be right back where we started from. Again.
Why Americans Are So Ignorant — Lawrence Davidson looks into the reasons, and it goes beyond Fox News.
In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble.
Shenkman spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this?
One thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for any population.
To put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.
The primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay attention. If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention.
[...]
It may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly focused critical thought.
But beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies, be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the better.
Under such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to rouse them up in some propagandistic manner.
How The NRA Got What It Wanted — Blake Zeff reports in Salon that Wayne LaPierre could get the last laugh.
It’s hard to remember now, but in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., this country seemed serious about gun safety reform. President Obama visited the community and tearfully invoked Scripture and vowed real action. Hunting enthusiast and senator Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) suggested he’d consider supporting an assault weapons ban. And National Rifle Association foe Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) called the organization “enablers of mass murderers” and vowed to wage war on it — and few rushed to its defense.
Then, somehow, things seemed to get even worse for the NRA. After a full week of silence after the tragedy, it held a press conference in Washington, D.C., in which its leader, Wayne LaPierre, inspired laughter and ridicule by supporting zero reforms to guns, aside from a call for more of them (arm teachers!).
But for all the mockery LaPierre’s speech elicited (and maybe even deserved), history may well show it to be a canny political maneuver. By effectively shifting the conversation far to the right, he also shifted rightward what constituted a “compromise” in the gun discussion. And ultimately, against all odds, his organization would emerge with a deal it could more than live with — in fact, one it had once publicly proposed, itself.
In other words, it is Wayne LaPierre who will get the last laugh.
The first thing to remember when it comes to the NRA and its goals is that — despite its carefully cultivated image as a hobbyist group for hunters and sportsmen — it’s far more like a trade or lobbying group for gun manufacturers. It’s the gun companies, after all, who largely fund the group. This is relevant because the imperatives of weapons producers are different from those of consumers. While polls show that gun owners — and even members of the NRA – are willing to support certain restrictions on gun ownership, these are not the opinions that matter. If the manufacturers (i.e., the funders of the group) will stand to lose massive profits from a given initiative, logic dictates that averting said measure will be fought by the NRA with brute force.
This is why bans on merchandise like assault weapons and high-capacity magazines will always be opposed so intensely by the NRA (though, in fairness, there are many gun owners who share the group’s vim in opposing these measures). It’s difficult to estimate just how much gun manufacturers stand to lose by having to stop manufacturing a chunk of their catalogue, but it’s self-evident to assume the number is not negligible.
It’s Not Just For Wizards Anymore — Turning Quidditch into a real sport. Raya Jalabi of The Atlantic has the story. (Now if they were to play it at Sunlife Stadium, I’d vote for it.)
“I’ve had my shoulder thrown out from an illegal tackle. I’ve had my lips busted open more times than I can count. I had a concussion earlier this year and I spent my first week of senior year with a black eye from a broomstick… It’s certainly not for the faint of heart.”
Amanda Dallas, a student at New York University, isn’t talking about rugby or dodgeball or even high-risk housekeeping. She’s talking about Quidditch, the sport of choice for wizards and witches in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.
Dallas recounted her history of Quidditch-related injuries on the way to Kissimmee, Florida, where she’ll compete this weekend with her college intramural team, the NYU Nundu, in the Muggle Quidditch World Cup VI, the highlight of the Muggle Quidditch year. She, like an estimated 1,500 other college-age players along with 12,000 spectators from around the world, will descend upon Kissimmee with broomsticks and gusto, ready for the sixth installment of the magical athletic tournament.
In the fictional boy-wizard bildungsroman, Quidditch is described as “an extremely rough but very popular semi-contact sport, played by wizards and witches around the world.” In the muggle (or non-magical) realm, Quidditch has strived to stay close to its fictional conception. Athletes play the game with one hand firmly gripping a broomstick, itself comfortably nested between the player’s legs.
Most of the novelized characteristics of the game have stayed intact: There are seven people per team, three elevated hoops that act as goalposts, quaffles (volleyball-like balls, thrown through the hoops to score points), bludgers (kickball-like balls used to hit opponents with), and, of course, a golden snitch. In J.K. Rowling’s original, the snitch was a tiny self-propelled golden ball with wings that darted around until a team’s “seeker” captured it, thus ending the game. But in Muggle Quidditch, the snitch is a person, dressed in yellow, who has a tennis-ball tail. To end the game in real-world terms means to capture the snitch’s tail.
Quidditch is more than a whimsical expression of fandom, though. It’s an amalgam of different sports, from dodgeball to basketball to rugby and more, with more than 700 rules laid out in a 172-page manual. Hundreds of teams have popped up across the globe, 300 of which are officially-recognized members of the governing body, the International Quidditch Association. Thousands of college-age plus students clamber to participate. And many of those participants would like to see the game, which has only been around since 2005, achieve some sort of legitimacy as a sport in its own right.
Doonesbury — Their good name.
It is good that the Senate agreed to debate the gun bill. As Chris Hayes noted, it’s amazing that the Senate agreed to do anything.
But now that the bill is up for debate, what are the chances that it will pass without being amended to the point that it is meaningless? The assault weapons ban is already doomed, having been stripped out in committee and now being brought back as an amendment — and therefore just as easily stripped out as before. The universal background check is anything but now that private sales are off the table. The large capacity magazine limit never made it into the bill, period.
If the Senate passes it, then it goes to the House, and that is where bills like this go to die. The parents of Sandy Hook did a good job of lobbying the Senate, but there are only 100 members. The House has 435, many of whom serve at the pleasure of the NRA. Whatever comes out of the Senate will not survive unless it is so diluted as to be less than meaningless. It will be a sham and an mockery to both the people who died from gun violence and the people who stood up for them. And in spite of the fact that 90% of Americans think we need all of the proposals in the original bill, the NRA and the barrel-strokers will have won, because no one ever lost an election by exploiting the greed, fear, and paranoia of their base.
But that doesn’t mean we give up. We have to keep trying. The worst part is that when we thought we’d reached the tipping point at Newtown, it still isn’t enough to turn the tide. I shudder to think what will.
The gun bill gets past the filibuster threat.
The Senate voted 68-31 on Thursday to send gun control legislation to the floor, passing a key test vote but setting up a much more painful battle toward final passage.
Sixteen Republicans joined all but two Democrats to back the procedural motion. Many of the GOP lawmakers who voted for the motion to proceed don’t support the bill, and warned that they may not vote to allow a final up-or-down vote. But they decided not to eschew the debate.
“I welcome a debate on gun control and you should too,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
The two Democrats to vote against the motion were Sens. Mark Pryor (AR) and Mark Begich (AK), both of whom are up for reelection next year.
“Americans are looking to us for solutions and for action, not filibustering or sloganeering,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT). “The Second Amendment is secure and will remain secure and protected.”
Between Republican threats to use every procedural tool available to gum up the legislation — the Senate provides many — and skittish red-state Democrats facing reelection in 2014, the fate of the legislation is uncertain.
One step at a time.
