Gun Violence Research Remains Neutralized

Spitting hot lead in defense of America, mom, 

apple pie, the flag, automatic weapons, ammo, etc.

The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are important risk factors for homicide in the home. Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance. .... Our data indicate that keeping a gun in the home is independently associated with an increase in the risk of homicide in the home. The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are also important risk factors. -- Arthur L. Kellermann, et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 329:1084-1091, Oct. 7, 1993

“The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.” – conservative Chief Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger

In an average year, gun violence in America kills nearly 40,000 people, injures more than twice as many, and costs our nation $280 billion. .... examining the serious economic consequences of gun violence is paramount to understanding just how extensive and expensive this crisis is. .... On an average day:

• American taxpayers pay a daily average of $34.8 million for medical care, first responders, ambulances, police, and criminal justice services related to gun violence.
• Employers every day lose $1.4 million in productivity, revenue, and costs required to recruit and train replacements for victims of gun violence.

CONTEXT

In 1996, congress effectively banned federal funding for gun violence research. The ban was a response by people who opposed gun regulation and the NRA to a 1993 research paper (quoted above) that shows that gun ownership was a risk factor for domestic homicide. That unsurprising result sent the gun people into a crazed frenzy of fear and rage. As usual, the inconvenient research paper was smeared by partisan propaganda. It was falsely characterized as a political attempt to take away everyone's guns. Once again, inconvenient science and truth was politicized and lied about for ideological and special interest reasons, mostly gun industry profit. That came at the expense of the public interest, in particular, public safety.

The ban came in the form of a law that barred the CDC from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” Over the years, the NRA and others justified keeping the ban in place in the face of attempts to get it removed. The justifications included lies such as (i) the CDC does not have the expertise to get involved in gun violence research, and (ii) the research is being done in other federal agencies. When ideology and/or big money is at stake, inconvenient facts and truths are shamelessly obliterated by lies and slanders for political partisan reasons in congress and for special interest profit.

The situation in 2021

An article in the New York Times, Can New Gun Violence Research Find a Path Around the Political Stalemate?, curiously suggests that the research funding ban is still in effect while actually saying it isn't. Maybe this is the NYT's attempt to help get the funding ban removed. Who knows? The NYT writes:

And Andrew R. Morral, a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, a research group, is using sophisticated modeling tools to estimate rates of gun ownership in every state, with detailed demographic information. The purpose, he said, is to search for patterns in firearm homicides and suicides — a first, basic step in research that could lead to reducing them.

The recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Colo., have once again left Democrats and Republicans in a stalemate over background checks for gun buyers and assault weapons bans. But public health experts say a new round of research could pave the way for gun policies that avoid partisan gridlock — and ultimately save thousands of lives.

The studies by Dr. Naik-Mathuria and the others are being paid for by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is once again funding research into gun violence after a nearly 25-year hiatus imposed by Congress. And while they might not reduce the number of massacres, mass shootings account for an extremely small percentage of the roughly 40,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence.

“It’s not either, ‘Keep your guns or prevent gun violence,’ ” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who helped establish the C.D.C.’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control but said he was fired in the late 1990s under pressure from Republicans who opposed the center’s gun research. “There’s a strategy that science can help us define where you can do both — you can protect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and at the very same time reduce the toll of gun violence.” 

Federal money for gun research all but disappeared after Congress in 1996 enacted the so-called Dickey Amendment, which barred the C.D.C. from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” It was named for Jay Dickey, a former Republican House member from Arkansas, who proudly proclaimed himself the National Rifle Association’s “point man” in Washington.

In 2019, Dr. Rosenberg and Mr. Dickey’s former wife, Betty, a retired former prosecutor and chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, helped persuade Congress to restore the funding; lawmakers appropriated $25 million, split between the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, for firearm injury prevention research.

The agencies are now financing nearly two dozen studies, though backers of the research say the money is a pittance compared with the breadth of the problem. (emphasis added)

Inflicting righteous discipline on the miscreants,

you know, democrats, atheists, the LGBQNT folks, 

undocumented immigrants, 

people shopping for groceries, etc.

There's nothing like a good NRA point man in Washington to make sure that greedy, corrupt special interests get what their campaign contributions paid for. Before he died in 2017, Dickey expressed surprise and regret about banning the research money. He defended himself as saying something along the lines of: 'Gosh 'n golly, shucks, gee wiz, holey moly! I never intended to stop all the research. I just wanted to stop all the political stuff.' Maybe Dickey actually drank the cool-aid the NRA bought for him and was sincere, or maybe he was just another cynical lying politician.

So, here we are today, about 25 years later and still ignorant about gun violence and politically gridlocked. We are still ignorant about possible ways to reduce it without unduly burdening a fraudulent right to bear arms. And we are still suffering mass shootings by freaks, mostly enraged males, exercising their fraudulent right to bear weapons of mass slaughter.

Come and take it?? That's feisty!

Careful, don't grab the wrong pussy!

How Democracy Slowly Melted Away in 1930s Germany

Modern American fascists

The recent fall of democracy in Georgia is prompting some folks to raise the alarm over the fate of democracy. Thom Hartmann, host of the show Democracy Now! (left bias, high fact accuracy) on Free Speech TV, writes about this bit of history and the parallels with Nazi Germany and the fall of democracy there. Hartmann writes:

In light of what Georgia’s legislature and Governor Brian Kemp just did to crush democracy in that state, you will want to read what a brilliant reporter wrote in the 1950s about how the Nazis took over Germany. It illustrates what the GOP is doing with vivid detail.

The Nazis corrupted the political system and took it over, bit by bit, gradually drawing the people along with them, and packing the courts with partisans in a way that was shockingly banal and totally resonant with today.

And then, in a relative instant, they changed the laws so it was all irreversible.

This was Chicago reporter Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Germans who’d lived through the years of the Nazis.

An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Georgia legislature the power to decide who won elections in that state, regardless of how the vote turned out.

It was introduced into the House, passed the House; introduced into the Senate, passed the Senate; sent to the Governor and signed by Governor Brian Kemp… all in less than one day.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing a similar process:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security...." 

The German survivor continues, as if he’d been living in Georgia or Iowa or Wisconsin for the past decade: 

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ..." 

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. 

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. 

One day it is over his head."

A week ago, we all thought we had a fine constitutional republic that had just been battered a little bit by a crazy billionaire con man.

Today, we’re discovering that throughout the past five years — and really since 2001 with Bush’s PATRIOT Act/torture/war/wiretap response to 9/11 — we’ve been incrementally changing our country with every Republican administration, particularly at the state level, and most Americans didn’t even realize it.

We are farther along in the process than most Americans understand. America has now sunk so low in the rankings of democratic nations because of the way Republicans have rigged state governments and use the filibuster in the US Senate that we are as dysfunctional as Argentina or Hungary.

This, Mayer’s German informant suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.

"You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

Thus came the final opportunity for genuine fascists like Kemp to move and move quickly.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You're an alarmist.’"

Meanwhile, Florida is trying to pass SB90, which would require everybody in the state to re-register to vote for every election.

Are the parallels between 1930s Germany and America in 2021 fairly close, or are there major differences that render this analogy false?

Does American Democracy Have a Good Chance to Succeed?

Democracy under direct attack

The FGOP is now busy propagandizing the 1/6 coup attempt as honest, 

decent, law-abiding citizens just peacefully exercising their 1st Amendment 

rights, but being ruthlessly oppressed by evil, rampaging police

(Standard FGOP anti-democratic mendacity)

A New York Times article focuses on this issue. The NYT writes:

At the end of a winding answer on Thursday about competing with China and about his relationship with Xi Jinping, a man he said does not have a democratic “bone in his body,” President Biden offered up a revealing assessment of one of America’s most pressing challenges.

“This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” he told reporters at his first news conference as president. “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

China’s president, Mr. Xi, Mr. Biden said bluntly, was “a smart, smart guy” who shared with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a belief that “autocracy is the wave of the future and democracy can’t function” in the complexities of the modern world.

“We talked about China and the competition they’re engaging in in the Belt and Road Initiative,” Mr. Biden said. “And I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative coming from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world.”

There is a striking similarity between Mr. Biden’s list and Mr. Xi’s “Made in China 2025” initiative — which was first announced six years ago as an effort to make China largely independent of Western suppliers for critical technology.

At the core of Mr. Biden’s infrastructure and supply-chain initiatives is an effort — parts of which began in the Trump years — to ensure the West is not dependent on Chinese technology. It is a battle that blossomed over Huawei, the maker of next-generation communications networks, but has now spread to fears that Chinese apps like TikTok could be a pathway for attacks on American infrastructure.

“China is outinvesting us by a long shot,” Mr. Biden said, previewing his argument, “because their plan is to own that future.”

In addition to FGOP (fascist GOP) efforts to obliterate free elections as much as they can wherever they can, the party literally hates government. The party leadership rabidly but blindly believes that deregulated markets solve nearly all problems better than government power ever could. In this regard, the FGOP is a powerful anti-democratic autocratic political force that Biden has to fight tooth and claw against.  

It is clear that the FGOP's vision of deregulating markets causes power to flow from government to wealthy people and businesses. Republican brand deregulation removes restraints on the ability of special interests and wealthy people to make more money, e.g., they can ignore burdens like pollution, honest advertising, etc. The republican vision of commerce and government is not one where power flows to individuals. It is one where power flows up to special interests and wealth, not down to average people.[1] That is inherently autocratic, and if recent history is a reliable indicator, inherently corrupt, incompetent and lawless.

Obviously, most republicans and some or many independents do not agree with this vision of reality. But if one does at least understand the argument, the problem that Biden and democrats face in defending democracy is clear. How can democracy be defended when at least 35% of US citizens want a demagogic dictator in power? That is the case whether the authoritarians agree or not, or whether they know it or not. That authoritarian mindset doesn't seem to much mind the mendacity, crackpottery, corruption, incompetence and contempt for the rule of law that accompanies the FGOP's demagogic tyranny.

Does American Democracy Have a Good Chance to Succeed? Is the FGOP an anti-democratic political force working against democracy to build some form of a demagogic tyranny-Christian theocracy?

Footnote: 

1. Of the several deregulations I have looked at that were implemented under the previous FGOP administration, all deregulated special interests and power flowed from government to the affected special interests. In no case did power flow to average people. Power flowed up and concentrated with wealthy people and businesses. 

A moment in history the FGOP has clearly forgotten

The Tax Gap Gets a Second Mention!

The Washington Post reports this morning in an opinion piece:

But there’s some lower-hanging, revenue-raising fruit that has not featured prominently in leaks from the White House or Capitol Hill: giving the Internal Revenue Service more money.

Increasing spending to help pay for spending may seem counterintuitive. It makes more sense when you consider that every additional dollar invested in the IRS generates a $6 return, according to Treasury estimates, by enabling the agency to detect and collect tax bills already owed.

Thanks to years of budget cuts, the overall IRS budget is about 20 percent below its level a decade ago in inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, the agency has been given more and more responsibilities. These include implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, combating identity theft and tax-refund fraud, dispensing multiple rounds of pandemic stimulus payments, and, possibly very soon, issuing monthly cash payments to families with children.

With fewer resources available to handle all these duties, something had to give. That something turned out to be enforcement. Tax cheats can now get away with murder — or at least the ability to substantially shortchange Uncle Sam.

The number of IRS revenue agents — the auditors qualified to examine complex returns — has plummeted 43 percent over the past decade, according to a report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Audit rates of those filing these complex returns have also sharply declined.

For example, the number of millionaires who were audited in fiscal 2020 was about a quarter of the number from fiscal 2012. Accordingly, these IRS audits turned up unreported tax bills of $1.2 billion last year, about a quarter of the $4.8 billion found in fiscal 2012.

These numbers are presumably not declining because wealthy people and corporations have suddenly become more scrupulous about paying exactly what they owe. They know the IRS is outgunned; if anything, cutbacks in IRS audits and declining referrals for criminal prosecution have emboldened tax cheats — or at least encouraged well-heeled filers and the armies of tax experts they employ to attempt increasingly aggressive interpretations of the law.

The more conspicuous this lack of enforcement gets, the more additional people are likely to duck their tax duties. This has happened in other countries, such as Greece and Italy, where perceptions that everyone else is shirking have led to cascading tax evasion. No one wants to be the only chump left following the law.

Estimates for the size of the U.S. “tax gap” — the difference between what’s owed and what’s collected — vary. By one estimate, from economists Natasha Sarin (who was recently appointed to a post at Biden’s Treasury Department) and Lawrence H. Summers (the former treasury secretary who is also a Post contributing columnist), the IRS will fail to collect nearly $7.5 trillion of legally owed taxes over the next decade. Even that may understate the amount of evasion. A new paper co-authored by IRS employees suggests the ultrawealthy may be hiding more money abroad than had been previously estimated.

If about $7.5 trillion is going to be left uncollected in the next 10 years as the opinion asserts, then the tax gap averages about $750 billion/year. As noted here a few days ago, estimates of the tax gap varied. Tax cheats get to keep ~$400 billion/year (frightened IRS), ~$600 billion/year for 2021 (Janet Yellin) or ~$700 billion/year ± ~ $30 billion for 2021 (my estimate).

Looks like my estimate is closer to the mark than the IRS estimate. And, maybe it is closer than Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin estimates.