AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. Tidbits
from: NH1 News Political Report: August 27, 2015
by Kevin Landrigan, nh1.com, August 28, 2015
Many observers believe she’s already made her mind not to run but Gov. Maggie Hassan continues to be very competitive in a potential, 2016 battle with Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, according to a new, independent poll.
Public Policy Polling found Ayotte had 44 percent to 43 percent for Hassan. Interestingly, this Democratic polling firm has handicapped the race three times this year and each time the race was within 1 percentage point.
According to the survey, Hassan remains more popular than Ayotte does with approval/disapproval rating of 48/42 percent.
Conversely, Ayotte is under water with voters with 38 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.
Ayotte’s less favorable footing is largely a function of her not being as popular with Republicans (68-25 percent favorable) as Hassan is with Democrats.
Should Hassan pass on the race, PPP examined how another prominent Democrat might do against Sen. Kelly Ayotte, that is Executive Councilor Chris Pappas, D-Manchester.
This poll had Ayotte beating Pappas, 45 percent to 31 percent.
The margin of error for this Aug. 21-24 poll was 3.5 percent.
------------------------------
Given their leanings, it’s no surprise that Democrats fare better than Republican candidates do in the latest PPP poll.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich does best, leading Hillary Clinton, 43-to-41 percent mainly because he’s tied with her among independents (38 percent each).
Donald Trump (46-44) and Carly Fiorina (45-42) both barely trail Clinton as well but the results are effectively a dead heat.
Clinton has double digit leads against Rand Paul (47/37), Ted Cruz (49/38), and Mike Huckabee (49/36). All other candidates trail Clinton by 7-8 points.
Bernie Sanders does similarly to Clinton against Bush and Scott Walker but against Trump and Rubio, Sanders actually fares a good deal better than Clinton.
Sanders leads Trump by 9 at 50-41, compared to Clinton's 2 point advantage, and he leads Rubio by 13 while Clinton is up by eight.
"New Hampshire’s generally leaning toward going Democratic for the 4th Presidential election in a row," said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling.
"John Kasich does well but the same things that make him appealing to the middle might make him struggle with the conservative voters he needs to get the nomination."
------------------------------
State Libertarians took it on the chin this week with a US District Court ruling that upheld a controversial state law.
The Republican-led initiative was to reduce the amount of time that Libertarians or any other party for that matter has to collect signatures from registered voters to qualify candidates to appear on the general election ballot.
Until this law passed in 2014, these activists had the time right after the last election until August of the election year (about 21 months) to gather names.
The change reduced that window to a little over seven months meaning that petitions for registered voters could not be picked up by these would be candidates until Jan. 1 of the election year.
"To use a metaphor, this signature-collection process is like a marathon that’s hard enough just to finish, and this law now demands that the Libertarian Party run the marathon in less than two hours—all while the major parties are campaigning," said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director for Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire.
"The LPNH is disappointed by the Court’s decision. This law limits voter choice and stacks the deck against candidates who—like roughly 40% of Granite Staters—don’t belong to a major party. The LPNH is considering whether to appeal this decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston."
A federal court in Rhode Island had struck down an identical law imposing a Jan. 1 starting date.
------------------------------
This week’s public meeting of the Legislative Fiscal Committee reveals that privately relations remain very frigid between Gov. Maggie Hassan and Republican legislative leaders.
Both sides had reason to celebrate this week: they had put aside their differences to ensure that state parks remain open.
Resources and Economic Development Commissioner Jeff Rose needed the committee to declare the park’s need for $1.3 million between now and the end of December amounted to an ``emergency.’’
Why? Because under the terms of the continuing resolution that Hassan and lawmakers approved in June to keep state government running, the parks were only entitled to receive 50 percent of spending.
Problem is the parks spend about 60 percent of the year’s money during the first six months as those come at the height of the summer and fall tourism seasons.
They approved the money but several GOP legislators made a point of saying Hassan was to blame for the dilemma.
And at one point, Senate President Chuck Morse, R-Salem, made yet another overt appeal for Democratic legislators to oppose their governor and override the governor’s budget veto when lawmakers come back to take it up Sept. 16.
Fat chance that will happen.
------------------------------
Trump announced two additional staffers in the Granite State. Lisa Maciejowski Gambuzza has joined the campaign as office manager for the Manchester based operation and Jonathan W. Dimock of Newfields, New Hampshire will serve as a New Hampshire field representative.
As we first tweeted this week, veteran GOP operative Liz Christoffersen was named as a senior adviser to Scott Walker’s campaign.
She managed John Stephen’s GOP run for governor in 2010 and was a top adviser to Marilinda Garcia’s unsuccessful bid for Congress last fall...
2. Dishonest Budgeting
Ideology is a poor substitute for budget math
by Rep. Timothy Smith, manchesterinklink.com, August 28, 2015
As just about everyone in New Hampshire realizes, the Granite State does not have any sales or income taxes. In other states, these two taxes are primary sources of revenue for state budgets. Here, our state budget relies on a large tapestry of smaller revenue sources – user fees, small base taxes, surcharges, the state liquor store, and business taxes. Just like a real tapestry, if you start to tug on the strings you risk ruining the whole thing.
This year’s Republican majority in the state legislature (they have a majority in both the NH House, and NH Senate) isn’t just tugging gently at a few of the strings – they’re pulling as hard as they can.
Earlier this year, Governor Hassan exercised her constitutional authority to veto the disastrous state budget that was rammed through by the Republicans in the legislature. I don’t use the phrase ¨rammed through¨ lightly, or often, but in this case it fits. The entire budget process was handled poorly from the start with the finance committee not even opening a hard-copy of the budget during their work sessions, to having closed-door meetings with a Koch Brothers AFP lobbyist in the middle of budget negotiations.
One of the main problems, and a primary factor in Governor Hassan’s veto, is that the Republican majority in the legislature is trying to push an ideological tax cut that would have an enormous impact on the budget’s future, and seriously hurt our ability to fund the state going into the 2020s. The problem isn’t just about what these needless cuts will do now, it’s about what they’ll still be doing a decade from now.
Why do I say these tax cuts are needless?
Simply put – nobody needs them, and they won’t have any positive impact on our economy or budget. Business groups in the state have spelled out that tax cuts like this won’t help them expand, and that they need infrastructure, an educated workforce, and above all they need demand for their products rather than a small fraction shaved off their tax bill.
What’s worse is that the people pushing for these tax cuts, Republicans in the legislature, openly admit that they won’t have any positive economic impact and won’t expand the tax base. It’s 100 percent ideology.
In a letter earlier this year, Speaker Jasper said, “As to the business tax cuts, I do not believe that cutting them will bring in more revenue, nor do I believe that by themselves they will make New Hampshire a more attractive state for businesses to locate to or to expand,” while Senate President Morse admitted openly to the Sentinel Source, “We never came in and said, we’ll lower the business taxes, and we’ll have all this growth, and we’ll offset it,” showing that they had no intention of even trying to offset these needless cuts.
So, forgetting the politics, will these tax cuts pay for themselves? The simple answer is “no.”
Keith Hall, who is the director of the congressional budget office and was appointed by Republicans, said recently at a press briefing that, “The evidence is that tax cuts do not pay for themselves, and our models that we’re doing, our macroeconomic effects, show that.”
This is just the latest confirmation in decades of evidence showing plainly that arbitrary tax cuts do not have enough of a stimulus effect (and often have no stimulus effect at all) to compensate for the loss of direct revenue. What’s worse, according to projections from the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute which were published in July, these cuts are going to get even worse in the long run than they are now. The revenue coming from business taxes, in inflation adjusted figures, still hasn’t recovered from pre-recession levels and yet these folks want to make even deeper revenue cuts. According to the same NHFPI report, we would need to see 10 percent growth of the state-wide economy to make up for these cuts alone (we’re likely to see growth closer to 6 percent, which is an optimistic figure).
It’s not as-if the Republicans working on the budget don’t understand these very basic mathematical concepts – it seems as if they just don’t care.
Of course, with AFP dumping money into the state trying to run attack ads against Governor Hassan since her veto, some might ascribe a more sinister political motive to these budget moves – but I tend to feel that it’s just business as usual for Republicans in the legislature relying on ideology instead of math. It’s way beyond just trying to “reduce the size of government” these days, and some are left to wonder at what point we stop calling it ideology and start calling it sabotage?
I’m not suggesting we jack up the business taxes, and I’m not suggesting we need some huge revenue overhaul. Simply put, the current business tax rates are fine where they are, and are an important part of our state’s overall revenue system. There is an old saying: “If it isn’t broke, don’t try to fix it,” that could easily apply here, but I’ve got a better idea. If it’s not broke, don’t break it.
3. Another Benefit from Rail
Rail could aid freight traffic, too
by Chris Garofolo, nashuatelegraph.com, August 28, 2015
NASHUA - The proposed expansion of passenger rail into New Hampshire could also lead to a boost in freight routes across the state.
Michael Izbicki, chairman of the New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority, said Thursday there is a huge economic opportunity to extend freight along with commuter rail because freight trips would become more profitable when traveling on a modern track at higher speeds.
"You can't have a quality commuter rail system without a quality freight system because they run on the same tracks," he said. "This is all a good thing for our transportation system."
Izbicki's comments followed a ceremonial bill-signing at Nashua City Hall. Gov. Maggie Hassan signed into law two measures that amend Transit Authority language to streamline the agency and establish a study committee to examine public-private partnerships for intermodal transportation projects.
In a state with approximately 459 miles of active railroad, a proposed spike in passenger travel would lead to increased volume for freight as well.
State Sen. Bette Lasky, D-Nashua, was the prime sponsor of both bills. When asked about freight, she also touted the advantages it will bring to the state when coupled with commuter rail expansion.
The immediate needs of the state's northern counties differ from Greater Nashua, she said, and extending freight and passenger lines in the southern part of New Hampshire will eventually open up the North Country. Doing so has become easier since the relationship with the freight industry is less frosty.
"We need their cooperation, clearly," she said. "That had been one of the stumbling blocks as we tried to move forward with commuter rail."
Both Lasky and Izbicki said they now have a formal agreement with freight companies.
According to Izbicki, Pan Am Railways owns the rail network between Nashua and Concord. The company is the largest regional railroad system in North America. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, operated by the state of Massachusetts, owns the lines up to the New Hampshire border and now has operating rights to Concord because of a new agreement with Pan Am.
AND NATIONALLY
4. The Glass-Empty View
Democratic Blues
by Jeff Greenfield, politico.com, August 20, 2015
As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.
Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.
Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simpler—just measure the clout of the president’s party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obama’s six years have been terrible.
Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”
The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.
The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.
When Obama came into the White House, it seemed like the Democrats had turned a corner generationally; at just 47, he was one of the youngest men to be elected as president. But the party has struggled to build a new generation of leaders around him. Eight years later, when he leaves office in 2017 at 55, he’ll actually be one of the party’s only leaders not eligible for Social Security. Even as the party has recently captured more young voters at the ballot box in presidential elections, its leaders are increasingly of an entirely different generation; most of the party’s leaders will fade from the national scene in the years ahead. Its two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are 67 and 73. The sitting vice president, Joe Biden, is 72. The Democratic House leader, Nancy Pelosi, is 75; House Whip Steny Hoyer is 76 and caucus Chair James Clyburn is 75, as is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who will retire next year. It’s a party that will be turning to a new generation of leaders in the coming years—and yet, there are precious few looking around the nation’s state houses, U.S. House or Senate seats.
***
Barack Obama took office in 2009 with 60 Democrats in the Senate—counting two independents who caucused with the party—and 257 House members. Today, there are 46 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, the worst showing since the first year after the Reagan landslide. Across the Capitol, there are 188 Democrats in the House, giving Republicans their best showing since Herbert Hoover took the White House in 1929.
This is, however, the tip of the iceberg. When you look at the states, the collapse of the party’s fortunes are worse. Republicans now hold 31 governorships, nine more than they held when Obama was inaugurated. During the last six years the GOP has won governorships in purple and even deep blue states: Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio. In the last midterms, only one endangered Republican governor—Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania—was replaced by a Democrat. (Sean Parnell in Alaska lost to an independent.) Every other endangered Republican returned to office.
Now turn to state legislatures—although if you’re a loyal Democrat, you may want to avert your eyes. In 2009, Democrats were in full control of 27 state legislatures; Republicans held full power in 14. Now? The GOP is in full control of 30 state legislatures; Democrats hold full power in just 11. In 24 states, Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the legislature—giving them total control over the political process. That increased power at the state level has already led to serious consequences for Democrats, for their political future and for their goals.
“It’s almost a crime,” Democratic Party Vice Chair Donna Brazile says. “We have been absolutely decimated at the state and local level.”
Taken as a whole, these six years have been almost historically awful for Democrats. You have to go back to the Great Depression and the Watergate years to find so dramatic a reversal of fortunes for a party. And this time, there’s neither a Great Depression nor a criminal conspiracy in the White House to explain what has happened.
Some of the party’s national erosion may well have been inevitable. The transformation of the South from a one-party Democratic region to a (virtual) one-party Republican region accounts for some of the losses to the Democratic ranks. That 2010 election gave Republicans in nine states control over redistricting, which gave them more seats in the U.S. House and state legislatures four years later. And the dramatic fallout in support from white working-class voters can be explained, in some progressives’ eyes, by a failure to address the plight of what was once the party’s base.
“These voters,” pollster Stan Greenberg wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, “are open to an expansive Democratic economic agenda—to more benefits for child care and higher education, to tax hikes on the wealthy, to investment in infrastructure spending, and to economic policies that lead employers to boost salaries for middle- and working-class Americans, especially women. Yet they are only ready to listen when they think that Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed. Championing reform of government and the political process is the price of admission with these voters.”
Whatever the explanations, there is an unsettling reality for Democrats: While they may warm themselves over presidential prospects—demographic shifts and a Republican Party deeply at war with itself and consumed by a chaotic primary highlighted by the debate earlier this month, starring Donald Trump at the center of the stage—the weather where so much of our politics and policies will be shaped looks distinctly chiller.
“We are fooling ourselves,” says one well-placed Democratic operative, “if we think we can advance a progressive agenda in Washington, if half the Congress and half the states are controlled by a Republican Party enthusiastically working to undo every trace of progressive policy.”
***
In facing midterms headwinds, every two-term president has had to reckon with his party’s misfortune. The “six-year itch,” when voters punish the president’s party with congressional losses, has afflicted every president since Theodore Roosevelt with just one exception: Bill Clinton in 1998. In Clinton’s case, though, voters had dealt Democrats a crushing midterm loss four years earlier, capturing the Senate and—for the first time in 40 years—the House of Representatives as well. And since 1928, only one president—Ronald Reagan—has managed to leave the White House in the hands of an elected successor of the same party.
This historical record, however, offers little comfort to today’s Democrats or to Obama’s down-ballot legacy. No two-term president in recent times has seen his party clobbered in both midterm elections. In one case—the 1986 midterms—Reagan’s Republican Party did relatively well in the House, losing only five seats. But it lost the Senate when seven GOP seats turned over, some by very narrow margins. Democrats gained five House seats in 1998, even though their president was in the middle of a major scandal. And while only Reagan saw his party hold the White House, three other presidents—Eisenhower, Johnson, Clinton—all saw their party’s nominee come within a whisker of victory. Not only did Gore win the popular vote, but Democrats in 2000 picked up five Senate seats.
Wait, you are asking: Don’t Democrats, with the demographic wind at their backs, have a good chance of holding the White House? Doesn’t the Senate map give them a real shot at retaking the Senate? Don’t national polls show that the GOP is far more unpopular than the Democratic Party?
Yes—and a third term for Democrats along with a recaptured Senate would clearly affect Obama’s political legacy. Even with those victories, however, the afflictions of Democrats at every other level would ensure enduring political trouble.
5. Be Afraid
Crash-Test Dummies as Republican Candidates for President
by Paul Krugman, nytimes.com, August 28, 2015
Will China’s stock crash trigger another global financial crisis? Probably not. Still, the big market swings of the past week have been a reminder that the next president may well have to deal with some of the same problems that faced George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Financial instability abides.
So this is a test: How would the men and women who would be president respond if crisis struck on their watch?
And the answer, on the Republican side at least, seems to be: with bluster and China-bashing. Nowhere is there a hint that any of the G.O.P. candidates understand the problem, or the steps that might be needed if the world economy hits another pothole.
Take, for example, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. Mr. Walker was supposed to be a formidable contender, part of his party’s “deep bench” of current or former governors who know how to get things done. So what was his suggestion to President Obama? Why, cancel the planned visit to America by Xi Jinping, China’s leader. That would fix things!
Then there’s Donald Trump, who likes to take an occasional break from his anti-immigrant diatribes to complain that China is taking advantage of America’s weak leadership. You might think that a swooning Chinese economy would fit awkwardly into that worldview. But no, he simply declared that U.S. markets seem troubled because Mr. Obama has let China “dictate the agenda.” What does that mean? I haven’t a clue — but neither does he.
By the way, five years ago there were real reasons to complain about China’s undervalued currency. But Chinese inflation and the rise of new competitors have largely eliminated that problem.
Back to the deep bench: Chris Christie, another governor who not long ago was touted as the next big thing, was more comprehensible. According to Mr. Christie, the reason U.S. markets were roiled by events in China was U.S. budget deficits, which he claims have put us in debt to the Chinese and hence made us vulnerable to their troubles. That almost rises to the level of a coherent economic story.
Did the U.S. market plunge because Chinese investors were cutting off credit? Well, no. If our debt to China were the problem, we would have seen U.S. interest rates spiking as China crashed. Instead, interest rates fell.
But there’s a slight excuse for Mr. Christie’s embrace of this particular fantasy: scare stories involving Chinese ownership of U.S. debt have been a Republican staple for years. They were, in particular, a favorite of Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012.
And you can see why. “Obama is endangering America by borrowing from China” is a perfect political line, playing into deficit fetishism, xenophobia and the perennial claim that Democrats don’t stand up for America! America! America! It’s also complete nonsense, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
In fact, talking nonsense about economic crises is essentially a job requirement for anyone hoping to get the Republican presidential nomination.
To understand why, you need to go back to the politics of 2009, when the new Obama administration was trying to cope with the most terrifying crisis since the 1930s. The outgoing Bush administration had already engineered a bank bailout, but the Obama team reinforced this effort with a temporary program of deficit spending, while the Federal Reserve sought to bolster the economy by buying lots of assets.
And Republicans, across the board, predicted disaster. Deficit spending, they insisted, would cause soaring interest rates and bankruptcy; the Fed’s efforts would “debase the dollar” and produce runaway inflation.
None of it happened. Interest rates stayed very low, as did inflation. But the G.O.P. never acknowledged, after six full years of being wrong about everything, that the bad things it predicted failed to take place, or showed any willingness to rethink the doctrines that led to those bad predictions. Instead, the party’s leading figures kept talking, year after year, as if the disasters they had predicted were actually happening.
Now we’ve had a reminder that something like that last crisis could happen again — which means that we might need a repeat of the policies that helped limit the damage last time. But no Republican dares suggest such a thing.
Instead, even the supposedly sensible candidates call for destructive policies. Thus John Kasich is being portrayed as a different kind of Republican because as governor he approved Medicaid expansion in Ohio, but his signature initiative is a call for a balanced-budget amendment, which would cripple policy in a crisis.
The point is that one side of the political aisle has been utterly determined to learn nothing from the economic experiences of recent years. If one of these candidates ends up in the hot seat the next time crisis strikes, we should be very, very afraid.
6. Because of More Guns
America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns.
by Zack Beauchamp, vox.com, August 27, 2015
Wednesday's Virginia shooting, like so many shootings before it, seems likely to raise a debate we've had many times before: Why does the US have such a high rate of gun murders, by far the highest in the developed world? Is it because of guns, or is there something else going on? Maybe America is just more prone to crime, say, because of income inequality or cultural differences?
A landmark 1999 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference.
Crime is not the problem
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006032/gun%20homicides%20per%20capita.jpg)
(Javier Zarracina/Vox)
The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.
They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write. "Violence is not a crime problem."
Zimring and Hawkins determined this by looking at 20 developed countries' overall crime rate and rates of violent death. They found virtually no connection between the two, indicating that a country's level of violent death wasn't determined by its overall crime levels:
The lowest death rate country (England) has a crime rate just over average. The next lowest violence nation is Japan, which has the lowest crime rate also. The third lowest death rate country is the Netherlands, in the highest crime rate group.
"This data set provides a multinational example of the central point that lethal violence is the crucial problem in the United States," Zimring and Hawkins write. "It shows the United States clustered with other industrial countries in crime rate, but head and shoulders above the rest in violent death."
Why does this happen? It's not because, as you might think, American violent criminals are just more likely to kill people. "Only a minority of Los Angeles homicides grow out of criminal encounters like robbery and rape," they find (there's no reason to believe the pattern would differ in other cities). So even if it could be shown that American robbery and rape rates are across-the-board higher than those in similar countries (whichdoesn't appear true today), that still wouldn't explain why America has so many more homicides than other countries.
Again, Zimring and Hawkins's LA data was revealing. "A far greater proportion of Los Angeles homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances [than robbery or rape]," they find.
This is where guns enter the story. The mere presence of firearms, according to Zimring and Hawkins, makes a merely tense situation more likely to turn deadly. When a gang member argues with another gang member, or a robber sticks up a liquor store, there's always a risk that the situation can escalate to some kind of violence. But when people have a handheld tool that is specially engineered for violently killing, escalation to murder becomes much, much more likely.
And indeed, that's what Zimring and Hawkins's data found. "A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," they explain. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime fifty-four times as deadly in New York City as in London."
Guns, not criminality per se, are the problem.
Guns are still the problem today
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006202/gun%20ownership%20countries.jpg)
Countries with more guns have more gun deaths.
In an email, Zimring contended that Crime Is not the Problem's core argument remains true today, despite a significant international drop in overall crime rates. "There has been quite a bit of work on these issues in the 18 year[s] since the book was published," he wrote, "and it confirms the basic argument rather powerfully."
The data seems to support this. "Robbery and assault rates ... reveal several Western nations that rival the United States," a 2011 review found. "While the level of lethal violence in the United States is probably the highest in the Western world, it is hard to make the case for US exceptionalism when it comes to non-lethal violence."
Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, called Zimring and Hawkins's book "an excellent source." In a phone interview, he pointed to a number of more recent studies that fit the pattern it identified.
"There's no question the United States faces a number of distinctive social policy challenges, some of which affect the crime rate. But many other OECD countries face their own distinctive problems that affect their crime rate," he told me. Western Europe, for example, has a major problem with drug use. Canadian cities have "very high" rates of property crime like car theft. And yet, the US still stands out on murders.
"I think that Americans have this view of Western Europe, or Toronto for that matter, which is very stereotypical and doesn't take into account the challenges that many of peer industrial democracy problems face," he points out. "There's a lot of drug sale, a lot of ethnic stratification and conflict, there's a lot of just general crime."
Pollack also shared Zimring and Hawkins's theory of the ease with which guns escalate conflict to violence, and thus heighten homicide rates. "Some of the behaviors that we think of as fundamentally linked with violence may stay quite steady as the violence rate goes down, as you get a better handle on the gun issue," he explained.
New York's recent tightening enforcement of gun laws serves as a good example. According to Pollack, New York didn't effectively reduce its heroin use rate or solve underlying problems such as poverty — the things that gun rights advocates often claim actually contribute to gun violence. But New York did tighten gun restrictions, which coincided with less violence.
"The proliferation of off-the-shelf handguns is really our problem," Pollack says. "If we regulated guns the way that England regulates guns, we would certainly have a much lower homicide rate."
THE STATES WITH THE MOST GUN LAWS SEE THE FEWEST GUN-RELATED DEATHS
But there's still little appetite to talk about more restrictions.
by Libby Isenstein, nationaljournal.com, August 28, 2015
As of the final days of August, the United States has seen more than 200 mass shootings in 2015. The murder of WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on Wednesday during an on-air broadcast brought the issue of guns back to the forefront of the political debate.
Hours after the incident, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for the immediate tightening of gun laws. Across the aisle, Republican contenders also expressed sympathy and grief, but dismissed the call for stricter gun legislation, citing other factors—mental health, poor law enforcement—as the causes of America's gun-violence problem. One candidate asked, "What law in the world could have prevented him from killing them?"
While it's certainly true that a number of factors contribute to the high rates of gun violence in the U.S., a comparison of state laws versus rates of shooting deaths does show a correlation. The states that impose the most restrictions on gun users have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths, while states with fewer regulations typically have a much higher death rate from gun violence.
Full table with gun laws in all states here.
Concealed Carry
In regulating the right to carry a concealed weapon, states generally fall into one of two camps: "may issue" and "shall issue." In the "may issue" states, law enforcement agencies are granted discretion in determining who receives a permit. In the "shall issue" states, law enforcement has little to no discretion, and is obligated to issue a permit to just about any applicant that meets basic requirements. Four states do not require a permit to carry a concealed firearm.
Among the 10 "may issue" states, the average rate of gun deaths in 2013 was seven fewer (out of every 100,000) than the rate among "shall issue" states, and states that do not require a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Background checks
Federal law requires background checks on all commercial gun sales. However, this excludes any transaction from an unlicensed seller, such as a sale at a gun show or online. An estimated 40 percent of gun sales in the country are made via unlicensed sellers.
In an attempt to close this loophole, certain states have laws subjecting all gun sales, regardless of vendor type, to background checks.
Among the 18 states that impose extra background check requirements for private gun sales, the average rate of gun deaths in 2013 was five fewer (out of every 100,000) than the rate among states that do not regulate background checks beyond the federal requirements.
"Stand your ground"
When it comes to self-defense laws in the U.S., there are two broad categories for states: "stand your ground," and "duty to retreat."
In "duty to retreat" states, a person must attempt to flee from the dangerous situation before resorting to deadly force, unless they're already in their own home or private property. But in other states, "stand your ground" laws offer complete immunity from prosecution for the person defending him or herself with deadly force, whether the encounter occurs in that person's home, or in a public setting.
Among the 21 states that do not have any kind of "stand your ground" law, the average rate of gun deaths in 2013 was five fewer (out of every 100,000) than the rate among states that do.
Lessons From the Virginia Shooting
by Nicholas Kristof, nytimes.com, August 26, 2015
The slaying of two journalists Wednesday as they broadcast live to a television audience in Virginia is still seared on our screens and our minds, but it’s a moment not only to mourn but also to learn lessons.
The horror isn’t just one macabre double-murder, but the unrelenting toll of gun violence that claims one life every 16 minutes on average in the United States. Three quick data points:
■ More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
■ More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.
■ American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard professor and author of an excellent book on firearm safety.
Bryce Williams, as the Virginia killer was known to viewers when he worked as a broadcaster, apparently obtained the gun used to murder his former co-workers Alison Parker and Adam Ward in response to the June massacre in a South Carolina church — an example of how gun violence begets gun violence. Williams may have been mentally disturbed, given that he videotaped Wednesday’s killings and then posted them on Facebook.
“I’ve been a human powder keg for a while … just waiting to go BOOM!!!!,” Williams reportedly wrote in a lengthy fax sent to ABC News after the killings.
Whether or not Williams was insane, our policies on guns are demented — not least in that we don’t even have universal background checks to keep weapons out of the hands of people waiting to go boom.
The lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition (that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible politically), but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has seven pages ofregulations concerning ladders, which are involved in 300 deaths in America annually. Yet the federal government doesn’t make what I would call a serious effort to regulate guns, which are involved in the deaths of more than 33,000 people in America annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (that includes suicides, murders and accidents).
Gun proponents often say things to me like: What about cars? They kill, too, but we don’t try to ban them!
Cars are actually the best example of the public health approach that we should apply to guns. Over the decades, we have systematically taken steps to make cars safer: We adopted seatbelts and airbags, limited licenses for teenage drivers, cracked down on drunken driving and established roundabouts and better crosswalks, auto safety inspections and rules about texting while driving.
This approach has been stunningly successful. By my calculations, if we had the same auto fatality rate as in 1921, we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually from cars. We have reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent.
Yet in the case of firearms, the gun lobby (enabled by craven politicians) has for years tried to block even research on how to reduce gun deaths. The gun industry made a childproof gun back in the 19th century but today has ferociously resisted “smart guns.” If someone steals an iPhone, it requires a PIN; guns don’t.
We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths in America. But a serious effort might reduce gun deaths by, say, one-third, and that would be 11,000 lives saved a year.
The United States is an outlier, both in our lack of serious policies toward guns and in our mortality rates. Professor Hemenway calculates that the U.S. firearm homicide rate is seven times that of the next country in the rich world on the list, Canada, and 600 times higher than that of South Korea.
We need universal background checks with more rigorous screening, limits on gun purchases to one a month to reduce trafficking, safe storage requirements, serial number markings that are more difficult to obliterate, waiting periods to buy a handgun — and more research on what steps would actually save lives. If the federal government won’t act, states should lead.
Australia is a model. In 1996, after a mass shooting there, the country united behind tougher firearm restrictions. The Journal of Public Health Policy notes that the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.
Here in America, we can similarly move from passive horror to take steps to reduce the 92 lives claimed by gun violence in the United States daily. Surely we can regulate guns as seriously as we do cars, ladders and swimming pools.
FINALLY
No comments:
Post a Comment