Pixel Scroll 6/13/16 Carry On My Wayward Scroll

(1) NEXT STEP. Sigrid Ellis responds to the Orlando attack with a series of autobiographical notes in “The road to murder is paved with microaggressions”.

  1. I was horrified to hear the news out of Orlando. But I wasn’t surprised. I wish I found murders of LGBTQIA folk to be surprising. But I have been found guilty of being gay my entire life. I know how much, how casually, how thoughtlessly I am hated. Hated not because I am evil, but because I am merely the most horrible disgusting thing people can imagine.
  2. The shooter went to a place of refuge, of joy, of celebration. He went to a place where queers go when we are told we are too queer to be seen anywhere else. He went to the place where all the shoving and flaunting of queer would have been hidden away from him. He sought it out, this crusader vigilante, this one good man with a gun we hear so much about. He took his righteousness and hunted down the gay he hated and feared.
  3. So how do we go on. How do we live in a world that hates and fears us?

I cannot stop anyone from murdering anyone else. I don’t have that power. But I am … done. I am done with letting the jokes and remarks slide by. I cannot continue to passively agree that I am a punchline, a threat, a bogeyman, a cautionary tale. I just, … I am done.

I can’t stop the Orlando murders, or any other murders of queers.

But I am done being complicit.

(2) HELPING. Stephanie Burgis researched a list of links about ways to help Orlando victims, and community LGBTQ organizations.

This is not the post I wanted to write today. Today, I was planning to announce a fun new project up for pre-order. I was going to talk about other stuff, the normal, small incidents of life. But I’m still reeling. So I’ll post about all those things another day. Today, I just want to pass on the things I’ve seen that might help a bit:…

(3) DIAMOND TIME. Alastair Reynolds’ story “Diamond Dogs” will be on stage in Chicago this season.

An adaptation by Althos Low (the pen name for Steve Pickering and creatives from Shanghai Low Theatricals) of Alastair Reynolds sci-fi story “Diamond Dogs” will complete The House Theatre’s 2016-17 season.

The production, set in the future, follows characters caught in an alien tower and will be third in the company’s season, running Jan. 13-March 5. Artistic director Nathan Allen will direct.

(4) TIME TRAVELERS PAST. The Economist discusses“Time-travel from H.G. Wells to ‘Version Control’”.

MUCH of what is good in science fiction is not about the future. Rather, the genre uses the future as a canvas on which to imprint its real concerns—the present. Counterintuitively, perhaps, time travel stories are often those tales that are most anchored in the present. As Sean Redmond argues in “Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader”, time travel “provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present”.

One of the earliest time-travel novels, H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”, can, for example, be read as reflecting contemporary anxieties about the effects of the industrial revolution on Britain’s rigid class system. The elfin “upper class” Eloi are seemingly content, but are in fact easy prey for the ape-like “working class” Morlocks. The fear that a strong but supposedly inferior working class, empowered by industrialisation, could come for them would have resonated with many of Wells’s Victorian readers.

Robert Heinlein’s time and dimension-hopping novels featuring Lazarus Long, who lives for over 2,000 years, are rooted in the author’s rejection of the social norms of his times. With their enthusiasm for nudism and free love, the novels, which must have seemed provocative in the 1950s and 60s, can now feel dated.

(5) REYNOLDS WOULD STAY. Alastair Reynolds tells “Why I’m for the UK remaining in the EU” at Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon.

Many of the arguments for and against membership of the EU seem to revolve around economics, which seems to me to be an extremely narrow metric. Even if we are better off out of the EU, which we probably won’t be, so what? This is already a wealthy country, and leaving the EU won’t mend the widening inequality between the very rich and almost everyone else. More than that, though, look at what would be lost. Friendship, commonality, freedom of movement, a sense that national boundaries are (and should be) evaporating.

(6) THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD. SF Gate reveals the crime of the millennium — “The great city of San Francisco no longer has a center”.

A brass surveyor’s disk, recently installed on an Upper Market-area sidewalk to mark the precise geographic center of San Francisco, has been stolen.

On Wednesday, city surveyors and Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru visited the spot in the 700 block of Corbett Avenue to call attention to the disk and to the work of the surveyors who had established the spot as the precise center of town.

It wasn’t technically the center of town — that spot is under a bush on a nearby hillside — but it was close, and it was publicly accessible.

At the time, surveyor Michael McGee predicted that the small brass disk — attached to the concrete with heavy-duty glue — would suffer the fate of similar markers and be stolen by vandals.

“I’d give it about six weeks,” McGee said.

He was off by five weeks and six days.

On Thursday, an orange arrow and shakily written “Geographic Center of City” were still on the sidewalk. A circular patch marked the spot where the disk had been, briefly.

(7) YOU SHOULD WEAR A HELMET. “Could a satellite fall on your head?” BBC follows German scientists’ efforts to find out.

“There are a lot of satellites in orbit and they will come down sooner or later,” he says. “They’ll probably break up and the question for us is: what is the chance of an impact?”

In other words, could sections of dead satellites survive re-entry to hit something or, worse, someone?

The wind tunnel being deployed for Willems’ experiment resembles a giant deconstructed vacuum cleaner attached to a pressure cooker, arranged across a concrete floor. The gleaming machine is covered in a mass of pipes and wires. Capable of producing air currents of up to 11 times the speed of sound, the wind tunnel is used for testing the aerodynamics of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft designs.

(8) GENRE DINERS. Lawrence Schoen presents — Eating Authors: Naomi Novik, the June 13 edition of his Q&A series.

I’m preparing this week’s post from New Mexico, where I am ensconced at a writers’ retreat and working hard to up my craft (while also enjoying great company, fabulous meals, and some truly awesome leisurely walks through nature). But such things cannot stop the juggernaut that is the EATING AUTHORS blog! Which is about as much of a segue as you’re going to get this week by way of an introduction for my latest guest, Naomi Novik, who should already be known to you for her Temeraire series which blends fantasy and alternate history (or, as it’s more commonly described, the Napoleonic Wars with dragons!).

(9) SEND ONE BOOK. Throwing Chanclas pleads the case for a Nevada high school library looking for book donations. Cat Rambo says SFWAns are pitching in.

I live in a town of 1200 people in the Northern Sierra Nevada –where it meets the Cascade Range near Mt. Lassen National Park and about two hours drive northwest of Reno, NV.  Two hundred of that population is students. Over the years as the population dwindled after mines closed, then mills–nothing except tourism and retirement have emerged as ‘industries.’ Many businesses have closed down and with it many things we take for granted—like libraries….

What we’re lacking is pretty much everything else.

We need racially diverse books. We need graphic novels. We need women’s studies. We need science. We need series. We need film. We need comics. We need music. We need biographies of important people. Looking for Young Adult. Classics. We want zines! Contemporary. Poetry. Everything that would make a difference in a young person’s life. Writers send us YOUR BOOK. We have many non-readers who we’d love to turn on to reading. We need a way to take this tiny area and bring it into the 21st century. We have a whole bunch of kids who don’t like to read because all they’ve ever been given is things that are either dull , dated, or dumbed down.

The students who are excelling are doing so because they have supportive parents at home and access to books and tablets elsewhere. But most students are without.

So here’s what I’m asking. Will you donate a book? A real book. Something literary or fun—something that speaks to your truth, their truths. Something that teaches them something about the world. Makes them feel less alone?

I’m not asking for money. I’m asking for you to send a new book or film or cd to us to help us build a library we can be proud of. Just one book.

So who is with us?

Send us one book.

Greenville High School/Indian Valley Academy
Library Project Attn: Margaret Garcia
117 Grand Street
Greenville, CA 95947

Thank you for your support.

If sending during the month of July (when school is closed) please send to

Library Project/Margaret Garcia
PO Box 585
Greenville, CA 95947

(10) SFWA. Today was the second SFWA Chat Hour. Streamed live and saved to video, you can listen to Operations Director Kate Baker, member Erin Hartshorn, Volunteer Coordinator Derek Künsken, President Cat Rambo, and Chief Financial Officer Bud Sparhawk talk about the organization’s new member experience, game writer criteria, the state of SFWA finances, volunteer opportunities, Worldcon plans, the 2017 Nebulas, awards for anthologies, what they’re reading, and more.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born June 13, 1943 — Malcolm McDowell

(12) TSF&HF. Leonard Pierce experiments with placing the emphasis on each different word in this six-word phrase, and ends up with a column called “Third Booth on the Left”.

“So, what do you guys sell?”

“Traditional science fiction and high fantasy.”

“Your average author isn’t 83 years old and nearly dead, then?”

Traditional science fiction and high fantasy.”

“Oh.  Okay.  But, I mean, you don’t just do space operas based on the technical education of someone who was an undergraduate when Eisenower was in the White House, right?”…

(13) TEH FUNNY. John King Tarpinian recommends today’s Reality Check cartoon by Dave Whamond.

(14) CHINA SF AWARD. “The Chinese Government is Setting Up Its Own Major Science Fiction Award” reports the Lifeboat Foundation.

This is pretty interesting: during the latest national congress of the China Association for Science and Technology, chairman Han Qide announced that the country would be setting up a program to promote science fiction and fantasy, including the creation of a new major award.

Throughout much of its genre’s history, China’s science fiction has had a legacy of usefulness, often promoted to educate readers in concepts relating to science and technology. This new award will be accompanied by an “international sci-fi festival” and other initiatives to promote the creation of new stories.

(15) HE BITES. A deliberately harmful robot named “First Law” has been built to hype discussion about the risks of AI.

A robot that can decide whether or not to inflict pain has been built by roboticist and artist Alexander Reben from the University of Berkeley, California.

The basic machine is capable of pricking a finger but is programmed not to do so every time it can.

Mr Reben has nicknamed it “The First Law” after a set of rules devised by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov.

He said he hoped it would further debate about Artificial Intelligence.

“The real concern about AI is that it gets out of control,” he said.

“[The tech giants] are saying it’s way out there, but let’s think about it now before it’s too late. I am proving that [harmful robots] can exist now. We absolutely have to confront it.”

(16) VERY LATE NEWS. Appropriate to the previous item, Bill Gates was named 2015 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award Winner – in January.

Story

January 3, 2016 — The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.   The 2015 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Bill Gates in recognition of his fight against infectious diseases, his warnings about artificial intelligence, and his funding of improvements in education since a smarter civilization is one that is more likely to survive and flourish.

About Lifeboat Foundation

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.

(17) PLAY BALL. “Chewbacca Mom and some special ‘Star Wars’ friends threw the first pitch at the Rays game”, as major league baseball blogger Chris Landers told Cut4 readers.

Over 150 million Facebook views later, “Chewbacca Mom” was born. She sang with James Corden. She was offered a full scholarship to Southeastern University in Florida. She started charging $20 for an autograph. And finally, on Saturday, the cherry on top: Payne threw out the first pitch before the Rays’ 4-3 loss to the Astros.

But, befitting a woman who was brought happiness to so many, it wasn’t just any first pitch. It was a “Star Wars” first pitch — featuring the cantina song, another Wookiee, and of course, Taylor Motter at catcher wearing a Chewy mask.

[Thanks to Cat Rambo, Jim Henley, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]

194 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/13/16 Carry On My Wayward Scroll

  1. @JJ: Thanks for the filk and the earworm. Loved Kansas and that particular song. I needed that today. Here, have an internet.

    I have a dull ache behind my eyes and the more I see of people, the better I like animals. I don’t understand the world anymore and I’m not sure I want to at this point. My head hurts. Can I go home?

    (Not going anywhere near JCW right now, as I have zero doubts he’s tried to justify that which has no justification and I can’t handle that kind of garbage right now).

  2. No need to read the jcwrong piece -I’ve taken the hit for you.

    No need to express condolences, I did it with my eyes wide open and fully aware of the consequences…and have already washed off my eyeballs with boiling bleech and sandpaper.

    I want to fisk that post, but every response would be something like – vile, odious, reprehensible, myopic, self-worshipping bigotry, the likes of which we’ve not seen since Torquemada…..

    which everyone pretty much already knows.

    Its obvious that ignorance truly is bliss.

  3. @nicpheas

    Yeah, it’s all pretty dumb. The killer in this case seems to have been closeted; and probably heard similar messages all his life. And now this. Toxicity all the way down.

  4. Dear @stevedavidson, thank you for doing a job nobody should have to do. I made it to the second sentence and decided there wasn’t enough brain bleach in the world. If upon further review, you decide you must fisk that postulant outpouring of intolerance, I hope it’s in some hidden corner of the interweb, because ugh.

    Generally, I don’t care what motivates mass murderers with too easy access to weapons. I just want it to be harder to act out their rage and fear in a way that creates victims. In this case, though, I do care, because nobody should have to feel conflicted about something as integral as sexuality that expresses itself consensually. Being straight seems like the default, but it really isn’t. It’s just one tick on the continuum and is no more or less normal than any other placement.

  5. 12 ) Traditional science fiction: it means who used to be who, but is no longer first. What it now means is what sells gets the attention. Who is still on first, but what is getting all the attention. If you can’t understand this, inquire of third base.

  6. The killer in Florida had several things going against him: emotional conflicts. religion, a masculine oriented ethnicity, severe taboos in his own background against his sexuality, and a large dose of the school bully culture. I can identify with the rage and anger but not the desire to kill.

    I understand all this kind of abuse from all sides. I just never tried to solve it with violence.

  7. Does anyone who is even slightly familiar with JCW’s views need to read his latest rant to know what he said? (I assume the bumper sticker version would be “WHY NO USE TIRE IRONS?”)

  8. @Bruce – of necessity, yes. Others may allow themselves the comfort of living in a tightly controlled information bubble, but those of us who want to stay attached to reality need to turn over the rocks and observe the behavior of those creatures that twist and turn and hide from the light.

  9. Given that any of JCW’s political pieces could be paraphrased as ‘for some reason I need a thesaurus to say “I am an ass”‘ I think I can safely skip this one.

  10. The politics of intellectual confrontation from a writer without an IQ is easy to skip. But seeing the current political theater, I’ll allow others to check under that rock from time to time for me until I must need to look.

  11. Bruce Arthurs: I check out JCW’s blog about once a week. Not sure what it would take for me to link him in a Scroll now that he’s not a driving force in gimmicking the Hugos. Foaming at the mouth isn’t news, or I’d have to quote a lot more Dave Freer, too.

  12. I see he falls straight into the “This kind of thing can’t be avoided” falacy regarding gun control.

    What can’t be avoided is having the occasional angry or delusional person with a grievance deciding to kill a bunch of people. The gun is just the convenient tool of choice. Take away every single gun in American and people will have to resort to things like poisoning food, cooking up poison gas, building pipe, pressure-cooker, and other type bombs from cheap, easy to find ingredients. using a knife, blocking the exits and seting the place on fire, or simply driving a car into a crowd.

    (The JCW link is) also a useful antidote to the idea that these shooting happen due to scary other people from some scary other place, and not due to hatreds we brew right here at home.

    For those of you already familiar with Pastor Steven Anderson, his reaction is…not remotely surprising.

    John Scalzi also wrote a helluva article about “Thoughts and Prayers.”

    Nice, but not remotely novel. Very common sentiment on the net, and even from some traditional media outlets. Prayer is the ultimate in old-school feel-good slactivism.

  13. @Darren,

    The much lower incidence of mass murder in other countries which have stricter gun control undermines your argument. It’s much easier to kill a bunch of people with a gun, and much lower profile and a much easier than assembling a bomb, poison gas, or your other methods – LEO do keep an eye out for purchasing patterns, there is more forethought required, and a higher chance of someone saying something or noticing something amiss.

  14. Chris S: Tannerite. Can be openly bought on the net and in sporting-goods stores. (I know of the existence of the stuff because it occasionally makes the local news when someone reports an explosion to the police and it turns out to be somebody playing with the stuff. I believe there are Youtube videos of people blowing up things like pianos with it.) The claim is that tannerite can only be set off with a high-power gunshot, but googling for “detonate tannerite without a gun” says otherwise. Cheap. Simple. Unregulated.

  15. @Darren – I don’t see why making it more difficult to slaughter large amounts of people is a bad thing. I’m not talking about getting rid of all or most guns, just the ones that are designed with mass murder in mind. From my experience working at my Dad’s hardware and gun store in high school, the people who buy AR15s, Uzis, AK-47s, etc., etc., fall into two categories: collectors, and people with a lot of macho insecurity. Please note, that’s generally speaking – obviously there are also mass murderers and people who honestly think they’re going to need those guns to defend themselves against intruders or the government. I don’t see any pressing need for those guns to be legally available. At the very least, they should be much more difficult to come by.

    Locks don’t prevent people from breaking down doors and robbing buildings, but they make it a little harder, and that prevents a whole lot of robberies.

  16. I live in a country that enacted some pretty strict gun laws. Can’t say I’ve noticed a rise in the number of gassings, bombings, use of freeze rays or armies of trained rats.

  17. @BGHilton: I prefer to think of Willard as a documentary.

    Speaking of documentaries, I also watched the new Mad Max last night (also referencing my viewing of Ex Machina last night, which I posted about earlier). I started out hating it because it was so damn silly, then decided I was knee-jerking because I liked the first two movies so much, and really, the best (the second) was silly as all get out, so I lightened up a bit and started enjoying it. Not sure how good it is, though.

    I probably need to re-watch Ex Machina, watching it more carefully. I thought it seemed very bro in an annoying way, but that may have been intentional. I liked the ending, inthr nf vg jnf. V’q bevtvanyyl nffhzrq vg jnf tbvat gb ghea bhg gung gur cebgntbavfg jnf gur erny NV (gjvfg!), naq jbhyq unir ernyyl ungrq gur zbivr vs ur’q whfg urycrq gur naqebvq(?) rfpncr naq unccvyl-rire-nsgrerq njnl.

    So far my favorites of the finalists are The Martian and Ex Machina. Once I re-watch the latter, I assume it will either go down to last place, or remain in the top two.

  18. In the spirit of (12);

    IMO the best Science Fiction Film of 2015 was The Martian.
    The best Science Fiction Film was Ex Machina.
    The best Science Fiction Film was Fury Road.

  19. @Chris S

    The much lower incidence of mass murder in other countries which have stricter gun control undermines your argument.

    I could point to counter examples for each combination of strict gun control or loose gun control and high violence or low violence. The causal link between a country’s gun control laws and incidence of violence doesn’t map out. This doesn’t mean stricter gun control would be a bad thing in the US.

    The real issues though are cultural. Those I don’t know how you fix.

  20. The horse ran out of the barn on guns and gun control long ago in the US. The number of guns in the hands of the general populace is greater than the number of people in the US:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/05/guns-in-the-united-states-one-for-every-man-woman-and-child-and-then-some/

    In the current political climate, it would be difficult to get even very basic gun control legislation through Congress. Sadly, I suspect that an incident like the one in Orlando or Newtown could occur on a daily basis and you would still have trouble getting anything useful or effective passed into law.

    The place and time where I grew up, guns were (and still are) a normal part of the culture. You could walk into any store which sold them and walk out in 15 minutes or less with the weapon of your choice, simply by showing a photo ID and paying for it. The availability of and prevalence of firearms is not the main problem, but an exacerbating factor.

    I fully understand why someone would want to go up to a high platform with a rifle and a scope to just start shooting until someone stopped me. I would never do something like that and I suspect most people who grok that would never do so either.

    The trick is to figure out why some people give in to such rage and try to stop it from happening. I don’t know the answer. I’m not even sure I know the questions. But trying to radically alter an ingrained part of a society is incredibly hard to do. I haven’t yet figured out how we do that.

  21. @Stoic: “The real issues though are cultural. Those I don’t know how you fix.”

    Painfully, over decades, with lots and lots of effort.

    Effort which, I must point out, one side of the discussion expends great energy in squelching every time one of these tragedies happens. They call it “respect for the dead” and say that “now is not the time” – as if there will ever be a time and somehow encouraging more shootings is respectful to these victims.

    To those who truly want to respect the dead: Do Something. Do something to help prevent more mass killings from happening. Those who have already died are beyond our help, but those to come… maybe we could prevent that shooting. Unless we claim that there is something pure and noble about refusing to act, of course. Because nothing honors innocent victims quite like telling their loved ones, “it’s all very sad, but we can’t be bothered to lift a finger to stop it. It wouldn’t be respectful to the people you’ve lost to make their deaths actually mean something.”

    Maybe I shouldn’t expect anything more, though. After all, they were only queers, and brown ones at that. Who gives a shit about them, right? We didn’t do anything when photogenic white children were gunned down in their picture-perfect classroom; why should I think we’ll do anything for marginalized outcasts?

  22. @Darren

    The denunciation of other people’s slactivism sits interestingly with then concern-trolling gun control.

  23. The denunciation of other people’s slactivism sits interestingly with then concern-trolling gun control.

    Having a different opinion from you does not make someone a “troll.” I simply think that the only chance of implementing gun control the US is to invent a time machine, go back in time, and prevent the 2nd amendment. It is very obvious that it just is not going to happen, because even though you may be passionate about gun control, there are at least as many people at least as passionately against it. As already mentioned, the horse is very, very far out of the barn. It is tilting at windmills in the real-world political climate of America. It is also security theater, because–as I mentioned–there will always be ways for people determined to kill lots of people to be able to pull it off. I’m not a slactivist for not proposing solutions because I do not believe there is a solution. It is a human nature problem, and there will always be occasional mass-murders from dickbags in anything short of a total surveillance, Orwellian police state (and even some in those.) It sucks, but it is reality.

  24. Darren Garrison, the founding fathers had gun control, and they’re the ones who WROTE the second amendment. Why can’t we?

  25. @steve davidson:

    Others may allow themselves the comfort of living in a tightly controlled information bubble, but those of us who want to stay attached to reality need to turn over the rocks and observe the behavior of those creatures that twist and turn and hide from the light.

    Did you really mean to come across quite so insultingly toward those who, for whatever reason, prefer not to give JCW their eyeballs or time? Did you really need to accuse them (us) all of “not wanting to stay attached to reality”? Because that’s exactly what your post sounds like.

    There are many ways to “stay attached to reality.” That I do not make the same reading choices you do does not mean I’m “comforting myself with a tightly controlled information bubble.”

    With regards to JCW and his crowd, I have already observed that particular bug crawling under its rock sufficiently that watching it further will shed no more light, at least not enough to justify seeking it out while other bigotry bugs are biting me day in day out.

  26. @Darren: “It is a human nature problem, and there will always be occasional mass-murders from dickbags in anything short of a total surveillance, Orwellian police state (and even some in those.)”

    Your definition of “occasional” intrigues me in this context. I would not normally use that term to describe something that happens more than once per day. Since you like reality, though, a few facts:

    – This is not a “human nature” problem. This is a “USA” problem that the rest of the planet has pretty much managed to solve. (Or are those people not human?)
    – More than four out of five Americans favor some degree of gun control that exceeds what we currently have. I would not consider that “at least as many” on both sides.
    – It is far easier to sneak into a place with a semiautomatic pistol and multiple magazines than with a speeding car or a gas mask.
    – It is extremely difficult to slaughter/maim people in triple digits with a blade. Or, at least, it’s definitely going to be a lot more work than squeezing a trigger a lot of times.

    We may indeed be unable to purge the desire to commit mass murder from the human psyche. We can, however, take steps to make realizing that desire significantly more difficult than it presently is… and equating guns to more strenuous methods ignores exactly that truth.

  27. Poor JCW must be so conflicted; here someone’s gone and done what he thinks is natural to be done to teh gheys, but it turns out to be an eebil Mooslem (who was also gay and likely driven mad by his religion and his US society claiming he shouldn’t be… and given easy access to military-grade weapons in his madness).

    Chuck Wendig’s essay is best essay.

    @JJ: I am seriously earwormed by the keyboard riff now.

    I found “Ex Machina” both so predictable and so straightforwardly misogynist that it’s going below NA on my ballot. Probably sciencing the shit out of taters for #1. It’s a pretty good bunch this year, though. There aren’t any WTF? entries — even if you don’t like one or more, you can at least understand why they’re on the list.

    keyboard riff

  28. I also think it is unlikely that any gun control laws will be passed in the near future. That doesn’t mean people should stop trying – many changes in law take years and decades to happen.
    That also applies to you can’t change human nature. You can, through changing cultural expectations, though this kind of change may take even longer, it does happen. Think of all the things once considered the natural order of things, that aren’t so today.
    Then there is the possibility of better medical treatment for mental health, reaching and helping these people before they reach the point of shooting.
    The one way to make sure that this problem is never solved is to give up and stop trying to solve it.

  29. Nicole, if you were leaping to my defense in your response to Steve Davidson, it’s okay; I didn’t take it personally. I tend to automatically turn down the fervency of Steve’s comments when I read them; they tend to be, umm, strongly worded but (I think) sincere.

    I’ve wasted enough spoons reading JCW’s past opinions, I don’t feel like wasting another. Steve may just have more spoons available than I do, and that’s fine.

  30. @Bookworm1398 The one way to make sure that this problem is never solved is to give up and stop trying to solve it.

    This is so true.

    While there is no way to know whether the mass murders done in the US since the Brady Law was not extended would have been attempted using different methods we do know the shooting in Orlando this past weekend likely wouldn’t have happened by an angry man using an assault gun he’d just purchased if the Brady Law was still in affect.

    During the time period of the Brady Law there were less of these kinds of incidents and there was a decrease in gun violence in America. Since it went out and assault weapons have been available for purchase again we’ve seen a sharp increase in these kinds of mass murders by mostly angry young men. Indicates two steps need to be taken:

    1. Stop selling the dang things because they make killing large numbers of people in a few minutes too easy

    2. Fix our education and social systems so we have less angry young people – we need to stop teaching our young conscious and unconscious hatred of the other or that they have rights to/over others

  31. @Bookworm: “Think of all the things once considered the natural order of things, that aren’t so today.”

    Slavery comes to mind as an easy example. Imagine someone in ancient Rome advocating that slavery should cease to exist… or, for that matter a medieval merchant saying that serfs and peasants should have just as much of a voice as nobles and knights. I’m sure they would’ve been buried by an avalanche of never-happen noises and complaints that such things would destroy society and end the world.

    Something I want to know: how can I, an average citizen, reliably distinguish between a Good Guy With A Gun™ and a cold-blooded killer who’s about to go on a rampage? Better yet, if the killer starts shooting, the GGWAG fires back, and the police arrive on the scene during the firefight, how do they know which is which? And once we uncover this no-doubt foolproof method of identification, can we please distribute it widely so we stop mistaking brown children with toy guns for killers with real ones?

    As someone said relatively recently, I am less worried about the “madman with a gun” scenario than I am a GGWAG who’s having a bad day.

  32. @Darren

    Ah yes, you’re not a slactivist, you simply think the problem is intractable. I’m not sure learned helplessness, learned helplessness in the face of a great deal of evidence that it doesn’t have to be this way is any better. You’re upset at thoughts and prayers – but think any change is impossible.

    Our current gun culture is a product of the post-1965 political milieu, with it’s seeds in the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. Now in some regions, it’s very attached to male identity – but it is not written in stone. That it is unchangeable in the US is an article of faith, not something that can be supported with evidence.

  33. @Tasha Turner

    To the best of my knowledge the Brady Bill is still in effect. It mandates background checks but has some loopholes. You’re probably thinking of the Assault Weapons Ban which I believe has lapsed. It really didn’t do much though. Defining an assault weapon in a meaningful well is difficult. Basically it forced manufacturers to delete bayonet lugs and switch to thumb hole stocks in place of pistol grips. It also banned manufacture of import of high capacity magazines but enough were in circulation from pre ban that the only impact was price increases. Any effect observed probably had little to do with it.

  34. “It is also security theater, because–as I mentioned–there will always be ways for people determined to kill lots of people to be able to pull it off. I’m not a slactivist for not proposing solutions because I do not believe there is a solution. It is a human nature problem, and there will always be occasional mass-murders from dickbags in anything short of a total surveillance, Orwellian police state (and even some in those.) ”

    When people wanted to build railings around bridges to make them inaccessible to would-be suicides, a similar objection was made toward expending the effort and expense, because it was assumed that suicides would simply find another way to kill themselves. That’s just common sense about human nature, isn’t it?

    Except it’s wrong. Suicides went down. Same in England when they replaced lethal coal gas stoves with natural gas – suicide rates went down by a third, and STAYED down, despite human nature remaining exactly the poorly-understood thing it is. Because suicide is always to some degree an act of impulse, and the more difficult and prolonged the process of giving in to it, the fewer people will actually go through with it.

    I’d venture to guess that murder is ALSO usually to some degree an act of impulse. And IMO, by making it much easier to indulge it by giving nearly ANYONE quick and easy access to a wondrous machine made to kill people by moving a finger, the wish becomes the act for thousands of people who act on impulse, as well as thousands of others who may act in a slightly more planned fashion but would otherwise lack the resources, the attention span, the intelligence, or the obsessiveness to carry out the more elaborate schemes you detail.

    How else would you explain by “human nature” why the U.S. outdoes most other first world nations in murder rates? By your logic, the other nations should have matched us with fertilizer bombs and other contraptions, but they haven’t. Are Americans something other than human?

  35. Darren: the fact that the US is awash in guns does not make controlling future purchases futile; note that the latest whacko bought his AR-15 very recently. The first step is to stop the flood of new guns; the second is to stop the private-sale exception.

  36. @Tasha — I think you are confusing the Brady Law with the Assault Weapons Ban (The Brady Law is still in effect). My comments below assume you really meant the AWB.

    we do know the shooting in Orlando this past weekend likely wouldn’t have happened by an angry man using an assault gun he’d just purchased if the [AWB] was still in affect.

    We don’t know that at all. There were millions of Assault Weapons in circulation at the time the AWB went into effect, and they remained widely available throughout those ten years. The AWB did not remove them from the marketplace – it only banned the importation and sale of new weapons. If the AWB had been permanently extended, the shooter would still have been able to purchase one (although it likely would have cost more). In addition, the AWB exempted weapons that were cosmetically different but functionally equivalent to banned weapons. Many new semiautomatic weapons with detachable magazines were developed between 1994 and 2004, and were just as deadly as those which were banned.

    During the time period of the Brady Law . . . there was a decrease in gun violence in America.

    Yes, there was. But the authors of a 2004 DoJ study say “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.” Correlation is not causation. In addition, the drop in gun violence started before the AWB went into effect (9/1994) and continued after it expired. The trend included other crimes, having nothing to do with Assault Weapons or even firearms. There isn’t much evidence at all that the AWB had any significant effect at all.

    Since [the AWB expired] and assault weapons have been available for purchase again we’ve seen a sharp increase in these kinds of mass murders

    The data doesn’t really support that. Futher, most mass shootings are done with pistols (see Virginia Tech, for example, or Luby’s Cafeteria or Columbine) — a Mother Jones survey counted 143 weapons in mass shootings between 1982 and 2012, and only 28 of them were assault rifles.

    I sympathize greatly with the heartfelt desire to “do something”. But so many of the “somethings” won’t stop insane people or radical Islamists or other ideological terrorists from killing large numbers of people.

  37. Just finished the Temeraire finale, League of Dragons. I’m just gonna put a link to Kate Nepveu’s spoiler-free review over at Tor and say that I agree with almost all of it.

    Fantsatic book, fantastic series, and such a good finale. With the added bonus of having a final sentence that both made me laugh, and left me desperately wanting more.

    I will now make preparations to cast a Summon Fanfic spell. There will be some gooood ones coming up with the setup Novik leaves us in!

  38. @Chip
    Darren: the fact that the US is awash in guns does not make controlling future purchases futile; note that the latest whacko bought his AR-15 very recently.
    Nitpick: it was a Sig Sauer MCX, not an AR-15

    The first step is to stop the flood of new guns; As pointed out above, stopping the manufacturing or sale of new guns doesn’t do anything about the fact that there are hundreds of millions of guns in the United States right now. Are you proposing confiscation? Because I don’t plan on turning mine in out of the goodness of my heart.

    the second is to stop the private-sale exception. Omar Mateen bought his gun at a gun store, and passed a background check. The San Bernardino shooters acquired their guns through an illegal straw purchase at a gun store, and the purchaser passed a background check. Adam Lanza used guns legally purchased by his mother. Dylann Roof passed a background check when he bought his pistol.

    Private sales of weapons aren’t the problem. So many proposed “solutions” don’t solve the problems of mass killings, and only affect law-abiding citizens who safely and legally use firearms for sport or self-defense.

  39. Bill: stopping the manufacturing or sale of new guns doesn’t do anything about the fact that there are hundreds of millions of guns in the United States right now.

    But it does stop the flood of additional new guns into the populace. Stopping new guns from being sold is just part of a many-pronged approach which would reduce gun violence in the U.S.

     
    Bill: Private sales of weapons aren’t the problem

    No, but they are one of the problems.

    Sure, you cite some murders which weren’t done with weapons acquired in private sales. But many, many murders are committed with weapons acquired that way. Tightening those regulations is, again, just part of a many-pronged approach which would reduce gun violence in the U.S.

     
    Bill: So many proposed “solutions” don’t solve the problems of mass killings, and only affect law-abiding citizens who safely and legally use firearms for sport or self-defense.

    So non-mass killings and accidental killings are done by “law-abiding citizens who safely and legally use firearms for sport or self-defense”? Um, no, I don’t think so. And law changes would help reduce the incidence of those type of killings, just as they would help reduce the incidence of mass killings. Your argument is hugely flawed.

    Methinks you are defending the right to hold that gun in your hot little hand just a little too hard. 😐

  40. @Bill
    Your correct I meant the AWS. Long weekend and beginning to the week. Typos/memory burps are bound to happen.

    Just because guns can be gotten illegally (bought, stolen, “borrowed from a friend”) doesn’t mean someone will use that method if legal methods disappear. There is no way to know if someone who committed a mass murder with legally obtained guns would have gone through another route if the US had stricter gun laws. It’s guesswork on both sides. No one knows what they’d do unless they are in the situation.

    Looking at other countries with stricter laws it doesn’t appear that most people find another way to get the AWS guns as other countries don’t have our stats.

    ——-

    Limiting sales of new semi-automatics/AWS guns, buyback programs, no sales of ammunition to civilians, and working on changing social attitudes in America are likely to make changes in the number of deaths.

    As to other gun control laws: I’ve said it before here: buying and maintaining ownership of guns should be as difficult as getting a drivers license and buying a car and we should have similar databases for registration as we do for cars. Obviously many guns won’t be in the database given 1 out of 3 families currently owns guns & at that frequently owns multiple guns. But going forward it would make a difference over time.

    Didn’t used to need licenses, register, or insure cars but today it’s hard to imagine that was ever normal. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk came out after I graduated high school and was married. How we look at drinking and driving has changed since campaigns like that came out. I didn’t expect to live to see LGBTI allowed to marry in the US during my lifetime but it’s happened.

    We can change attitudes and behaviors as well as laws if we have the will to do so. Does no longer selling AWS to civilians, implementing laws based on NRAs safety guidelines, combined with stricter background checks, licensing, & database registration totally solve the problem of gun violence? No more than making murder and theft illegal. Let’s not continue making perfect the enemy of good.

  41. I’m too tired and disheartened to put this very well, but it seems like at one point our society accepted smoking as something that permeated the culture and that would be impossible to change. Hell, EVERYBODY smoked, and they smoked everywhere. We made ashtrays in grade school and had candy cigarettes. In my lifetime, that has changed, and changed drastically, even with the deep-pocketed, multi-national tobacco companies fighting that change every step of the way. So things can change. We just have to out-yell and out-spend the NRA. And find some way of persuading people that going around armed to the eyeballs really isn’t the way to make the world safer.
    (Or, to bring this argument back into the scifi realm, how the heck can we persuade the aliens to visit if there’s a good chance some bozo is going to take potshots at ’em when they try to land?)

  42. Darren Garrison:

    “Take away every single gun in American and people will have to resort to things like poisoning food, cooking up poison gas, building pipe, pressure-cooker, and other type bombs from cheap, easy to find ingredients. using a knife, blocking the exits and seting the place on fire, or simply driving a car into a crowd.”

    Tell you what. We have stronger weapon laws in Sweden and in US and you know what that means? That people have not resorted to cooking up poison gas. Or pipe bombs. Or pressure cookers.

    What it means is that we have lot less murders.

    And I tell you this. That you even had to go back 20 years to a mad cult in Japan to get a result says something. Do try to compare murder rates in Japan with US instead. See something? 4.9 per 100 000 persons in US. 0.9 per 100 000 in Sweden. 0.3 per 100 00 in Japan.

    Less guns, less homicides.

    “Having a different opinion from you does not make someone a “troll.” I simply think that the only chance of implementing gun control the US is to invent a time machine, go back in time, and prevent the 2nd amendment.”

    No, the only chance is to actually work for gun control. Not doing everything to argue against those who want gun control. Not inventing ridiculously stupid arguments to avoid gun control.

  43. This idea that gun control only is about who owns weapons. It is not. It is about how you keep weapons. If they are locked into a safe or out in the open. It is about where you are allowed to have weapons. Are you allowed to have them in public or not? Concealed?

    And look at Australia. They imposed strict gun laws. And it worked very well. Very well indeed.

  44. @JJ: Beatiful filk on page 1, and this pair of lines was perhaps the best:

    They say that Mount TBR is
    A hopeless goal for all who scroll

    Or perhaps it was the final verse, I’m not sure. Either way: Thanks! 🙂 I appreciate something like this, especially as I continued to to read the rest of the thread (ouch, why did I).

    @Darren Garrison: “there will always be occasional mass-murders” – no, there will always be someone who for whatever reason goes out to try to do this, but I doubt this person, absent an absurd weapon whose only purpose is to kill many people, would’ve turned instead to complicated poison or bomb solutions. (Who knows, right?) More likely, we wouldn’t be looking at the biggest mass shooting in U.S. history; we’d be looking at something smaller. It’s a pathetic statement on the world – this country – today, but yeah, I’m thinking fewer people dead would’ve been better than 49 dead, 53 wounded. You seem to have this perfect must be the enemy of the good thing going on. Granted nothing will be perfect – so, that’s no excuse to do nothing.

    BTW “concern troll” isn’t the same as “troll” (why does this have to be explained every time someone uses the phrase “concern troll”? le sigh).

    @jayn: Thanks for that – interesting stuff that people seem to ignore. It’s not “people always find another way,” rather it is (or should be) “make it more difficult and incidents are fewer.”

    @Bill: “only affect law-abiding citizens who safely and legally use” – what a wild claim.

    @Another Laura: Hey, you put that very well!

    @Hampus Eckerman: Wow, thanks for that link. I believe I will start using it. More people need to read this. Link.

    And of course, people saying “OMG AUSTRALIA LAWS BAD” – well, the U.S. could do something different/less stringent. Australia’s a great example that toughening up helps, but it’s not as if the only options were nothing, Australian Rulez, Orwellian nightmare, or a time machine. (This is not aimed at you, just general thoughts.)

    GAK and I usually try to avoid gun discussions. I will regret rambling and watching this thread. 🙁

  45. Bill:

    “Are you proposing confiscation? Because I don’t plan on turning mine in out of the goodness of my heart.”

    What they did in Australia was that they created a gun buy-back scheme. And people turned their weapons in. And for those who didn’t? Well, it the police for some reason catch someone with a weapon – arrest that person and fine them or possibly put them in jail.

    This would be a perfect thing to do regarding assault rifles. There is absolute no need for a civilian to have a assault rifle.

  46. Bill:

    “Omar Mateen bought his gun at a gun store, and passed a background check. The San Bernardino shooters acquired their guns through an illegal straw purchase at a gun store, and the purchaser passed a background check. Adam Lanza used guns legally purchased by his mother. Dylann Roof passed a background check when he bought his pistol.”

    Cherry-picking. Lets see what science says instead:

    “Two recent studies provide evidence that background checks can significantly curb gun violence. In one, researchers found that a 1995 Connecticut law requiring gun buyers to get permits (which themselves required background checks) was associated with a 40 percent decline in gun homicides and a 15 percent drop in suicides. Similarly, when researchers studied Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase law, they found an associated increase in gun homicides by 23 percent, as well as a 16-percent increase in suicides.”

    Of course, the background checks should also be much, much tighter. I mean, Omar Mateen was on the suspected terrorist list. How the hell could such a person pass a background check?

    And here is another study on what laws that really have impact on homicide rates:

    “The study, published March 10 in The Lancet, suggests that three laws implemented in some states could reduce gun deaths by more than 80 percent if they were adopted nationwide. Laws requiring firearm identification through ballistic imprinting or microstamping were found to reduce the projected mortality risk by 84 percent, ammunition background checks reduced it by 82 percent, and universal background checks for all gun purchases reduced it by 61 percent.”

  47. @Hampus Eckerman Omar Mateen was on the suspected terrorist list.

    Is that new information? All I’ve seen is he was questioned several times by the FBI but they didn’t see a reason to continue investigating. I’ve seen a senator make a statement that he was on a watch list but not cite their sources.

    Currently in the US being on a terrorist watch list does not prevent one from buying a gun. GOP members of congress have successfully voted against it each time it’s come up for vote. Given how poorly our don’t fly list has shown to be I’m not sure I’m for specifically people on a watch list not being allowed to buy guns – racial profiling, name mistakes, unconscious bias and gut feeling used as much as facts – I’m not convinced our list is 50% accurate. I don’t trust my country/government to know what they are doing in setting up good anti-terrorist systems. No more than I trust police officers to not shoot black kids using cell phones.

    I worked for government student loan collection of defaulted loans years ago – once you hit the computer system it was almost impossible to get out even if you could prove you’d paid your loan off in full. The computer system wasn’t set up to let people get out of it. Took years for them to fix the system. From what I’ve heard it sounds like our various watch/don’t fly lists are set up as badly.

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