Clive Davis

PACKING HEAT

It's not my idea of civic bliss, but Michael Barone is sanguine about America's gun laws:

In 1987, Florida passed a law allowing citizens who could demonstrate that they were law-abiding and had sufficient training to obtain permits on demand to own and carry concealed weapons. In the succeeding 20 years, many other states have passed such laws, so that today you can, if you meet the qualifications, carry concealed weapons in 40 states with 67 percent of the nation's population (including Vermont, with no gun restrictions at all).

When Florida passed its concealed-weapons law, I thought it was a terrible idea. People would start shooting each other over traffic altercations; parking lots would turn into shooting galleries. Not so, it turned out. Only a very, very few concealed-weapons permits have been revoked. There are only rare incidents in which people with concealed-weapons permits have used them unlawfully. Ordinary law-abiding people, it turns out, are pretty trustworthy.

...In most of the United States, as you go to work, shop at the mall, go to restaurants and walk around your neighborhood, you do so knowing that some of the people you pass by may be carrying a gun. You may not even think about it. But that's all right. Experience has shown that these people aren't threats.

Barone is another commentator who thinks the Virginia Tech massacre might have been prevented if the students had been allowed to carry firearms on campus. Undergrads with guns???

MANNERS

A typically thoughtful post by Reihan Salam on the difficulties of blogging and being thin-skinned: "I'm just so convinced (wrongly, perhaps) that I'm a decent guy that I'm genuinely bummed when people electronically conclude that I should be stabbed."

Another etiquette story: a few days before she left for India, my wife rode her usual commuter train from Paddington. In one of the carriages, two heavily-built young black guys were playing a single hip-hop track over and over at deafening volume. People could hear it at the far end of the train. The noise droned on for around half-an-hour until the two amateur DJs got off at their stop. No one intervened or complained. Heads were buried in newspapers. My wife, who arrived home with a mini-migraine, thinks it would have been crazy to have tried anything, knowing the risks. I think I would have got a group of men together to ask for the music to be turned down. Then again, I wasn't travelling home, weary, on a train service that's maddeningly unreliable, with no conductor on board.

YES, IT CAN BE DONE

Slate's Bruce Reed, surveying the reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre, can't help noticing the elephant in the room. Why, he asks, are opinion-formers shying away from thinking about tightening the gun laws?

Across the political spectrum, commentators reached the same conclusion. Whatever they think ought to be done to prevent future tragedies, they're unanimous on one point: We're not going to do it. Even in the ivory towers, where the laws of political gravity don't apply, the dreamers were silent. For its online feature, Think Tank Town, the Washington Post asked a variety of scholars, "How can policies be improved in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings?" All the posts had more or less the same headlines: "The Real Problem Transcends Policy," "Gun Control Doesn't Fit This Crime," "Not Every Tragedy Has a Solution," "Evil Is Always With Us."

...Granted, most of the scholars in the Post survey come from centre-rght think tanks and have ideological biases toward doing nothing. But they're not the only ones the Post asked. The centre-left think tanks on the Post's list — like Brookings and the Centre for American Progress —didn't even bother to show up. Those of us who work in think-tanks are supposed to come up with ideas with little or no chance of passage. Yet in this age of policy ennui, even people who get paid to be hopelessly unrealistic can't suspend disbelief on guns.

Democrats run away from the issue because they're convinced it's electoral suicide. Reed isn't so sure about that:

Voters aren't the obstacle to banning high-capacity clips or closing the gun-show loophole; they support those measures by broad margins. The real hurdle is finding leaders who are willing to get tough on crime, no matter where they find it—and who have the standing to prove they know the difference between hunters and criminals. Bill Clinton wasn't a lifelong hunter, like Mitt Romney. He didn't need to be. He was a Bubba. In recent years, Democrats have suffered a Bubba shortage. But Democratic Bubbas are making a comeback in the South, Midwest, and West. As they gain confidence, they will realize, as Clinton did, that real Bubbas look to cops for approval, not the NRA.

[Via RealClearPolitics]

A MINUTE'S SILENCE, AND COUNTING

With all due respect to Megan McArdle, this is exactly the right time for "gun controllers" to come "crawling out of the woodwork".  Frankly, I've been stunned at the way so many American politicians and commentators have ducked the question since the VT shootings. The Economist, for one, has noticed how quiet it is out there: Only two [presidential] candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them."  How sad is that? The rest of the piece is a must-read:

Cho Seung-hui does not stand for America's students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow high-school students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America.

As I've already said, I don't have too much of a problem with what you could call "traditional" gun culture. Alex Massie, who has just started his own blog - and very readable it is, too - describes that side of life very well:

No attempt to understand  why America, alone of western countries, remains an armed society can  hope to be successful without appreciating the historical - and  constitutional - place the gun has played in its history. Wishing it otherwise is not enough to wish it away.

That culture still thrives. Three summers ago, I attended what proudly billed itself as "America's Largest Machine Gun Shoot and  Military Gun Show" in rural Kentucky. Guns from all over the world were on sale, while patrons could rent .50 calibre machine guns to blast away at wrecked cars, buses and boats. Time after time, I was asked if there was anything like this in Scotland. "No, not really", I would say, mustering as much understatement as seemed sensible. "You could see how people could twist this into something it's not," one sub-machine gun wielding man told me. "But," he insisted, "these people are just average Joes having fun."  And for the most part, he was right.

Point taken. But there's still room for a grown-up debate, isn't there?

TALKING ABOUT VIRGINIA TECH

I knew it wouldn't be long before I heard one of my acquaintances mutter, "Maybe Michael Moore was right all along." A sad thought, given that Bowling For Columbine is such a a woefully confused and deceitful piece of film-making. But if conservatives of the calibre of David Frum can't come up with a better response to the Virginia killings than this, then Moore is going to be enjoying a surge in his royalties. It's just not good enough to write about the campus deaths as if they were some baffling act of God:

There is no escaping the hardest lesson: that death lies waiting around the corner for us all. No public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact - or the equally fearful obligation to walk with courage under the burden of the reality of evil.

Although I suppose it's a shade better than Michelle Malkin's call to let students stroll  around with a gun in their lunch-box. Nobody should be gloating about America's gun problem - as Simon Jenkins notes, we in Britain have a knife culture that's seemingly second to none - but to simply make pious noises about "evil" seems a cop-out, to say the least.

As for whether everyone should maintain a dignified silence, as some bloggers (not including Matthew Yglesias) have suggested, all I can say is that if I were one of the parents of the dead students, I'd feel people had a duty to debate the rights and wrongs of gun control. I'd be much offended by the drooling 24-hour news coverage.

BTW, I've never been a rabid opponent of the kind of hunting that Rod Dreher describes so vividly. The first time I ever went to the States, I spent quite an amount of time in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, staying in a friend's house in a hamlet not far from Amish territory. I enjoyed looking at all the photos of dead deer and proud riflemen on the walls of the restaurants.  One afternoon, the mild-mannered fellow living across the street from us proudly showed me his sprawling collection of rifles and revolvers  (including a Magnum, as I recall). He had a fearsome set of razor-tipped bows and arrows, too. Much as I liked him, I did wonder what would happen if he ever had a nasty argument with his wife. As in so many townships, the locals never bothered to lock their doors at night. We didn't either. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure our front door even had a lock.)  But if I'd been living there permanently, I would have made sure I had a good set of bolts at my disposal.

THE VIRGINIA SHOOTINGS

If the news is grim enough, the response from the Malkinite Right seems almost as depressing. Ah yes, of course, the solution is to allow students to carry guns on campus.

SWAG

A study of the changing face of the British criminal leaves the NYT reviewer feeling short-changed:

For American readers, at least, underworld suggests some form of organized crime, but Mr. Thomas includes virtually everything short of school truancy in his definition... [He] seems just as perplexed by the changing nature of British crime as were the judges and the police officers of the time, who tended to blame American films and comic books for everything.

But the story still has its compensations:

One thing is clear: the British criminal heading to the gallows knew how to exit with flair. Neville Heath, the most notorious sex murderer of the 1940s, refused to appeal his sentence, preferring hanging to prison. Just before the sentence was executed, he sent a letter to a friend, warning him that if there is anything to this "reincarnation business," then "please break your morning egg very gently for the next couple of months because it may be me."

BLUE LIGHT BLUES

"I must say that police officers turned up very promptly each time I telephoned to report a break-in." Tired of being burgled, Alexander Chancellor has also had enough of all the red tape:

So what do the police actually do in these situations? The main thing they do is to take a statement from the victim of the crime, which is obviously a good idea insofar as this records what actually happened, but less so in some of its other aspects. Why, for example, do the police need to know how tall I am? Or how old I am? Or how I earn my living? Or whether I am retired? Or where I was born? These are among the questions they are required to ask of all crime victims, though it is of the criminals that one yearns to know the answers.

One will probably never know, however, for the rigid bureaucratic rituals imposed on the police seem to stifle all initiative for catching burglars. High on their list of priorities is to offer "counselling" to victims of crime, whereas in most circumstances there could be nothing as comforting to them as bringing their persecutors to justice.

A GLIMPSE INSIDE A FRENCH GHETTO

A reporter rides the bus to an underclass housing development on the outer fringes of Lyons. Lots of different root causes -  economic, cultural, religious - and they still have a Communist mayor, not to mention a main boulevard named after Lenin:

Anyone who has work leaves. Ghassan goes to the airport St-Exupéry, where he has a job at the luggage counter, un boulot CDD, which means contrat à durée déterminée, a job with an expiry date. With a CDD under your sleeve, you're likely to stay in the kid's room in France. The bank won't give you a loan, the landlord not a single cell. 73 percent of all first jobs are CDD, and only half of them turn into a long-term job, a CDI or contrat à durée indéterminée. Ghassan would actually like to get away from the luggage and become a steward for Air France. But to do that, he would need a few things that he doesn't have, like a high school diploma.

OUT OF BALANCE

As I've mentioned already, one afternoon about six months ago a car demolished the low garden wall at the front of my house. After I heard a terrific bang, I went out to see what had happened, and saw that the driver had driven on about 40 yards further down our street, and was staring up at one of the houses. When I got closer to him, I realised he'd been drinking. He was completely oblivious to what he'd just done, and was much more interested in confronting an ex-girlfriend who'd apparently just dumped him. (She wasn't in, as a matter of fact.) After threatening me, he calmed down, and gave me his details, but only on the understanding that I wouldn't call the police. (I had no intention of honouring that particular promise.)

After a few more minutes, the girlfriend arrived with her parents; he drove off without speaking to her. I rang 999, not because of the damage to the wall (which will cost £5,000 to rebuild) but because he looked and smelt way over the limit, and was clearly a menace to anyone on the road. The girlfriend's mother also told me that they were considering taking out a restraining order against him because of his past behaviour.

Over four hours later, a PC turned up and just about summoned up the energy to take a statement from me. One of the first things he said was that he'd forgotten to bring a camera to take a picture of the damage. When I asked him if he was going to speak to the girlfriend, he said he wouldn't because he didn't want to get the cases mixed up with each other. And because of the time that had elapsed, it was too late to breathlyze the driver. Frankly, he seemed less than interested in the whole affair. 

I've now had a letter from the police telling me the driver's punishment (for careless driving, I assume) involved attending a one and a half day driver improvement course, arranged "as an alternative to prosecution".

A year or so ago, I was caught on a speed camera doing 37mph in a 30mph zone late at night when there were no pedestrians or other cars around. As a result, I ended up being sent on a one-day driver's course.

Something isn't quite right here.