I anticipated the State of the Union Address, more or less, correctly, though I underestimated Obama’s forthrightness. He entered softly, calling for bi-partisanship, but he followed up with a pretty big stick, strongly arguing for his agenda, including, most spectacularly, the matter of class and class conflict, daring the Republicans to dissent, ending the speech on a high emotional note on gun violence and the need to have a vote on legislation addressing the problem. Before the speech, I wondered how President Obama would balance assertion of his program with reaching out to Republicans. This was an assertive speech.

The script was elegantly crafted, as usual, and beautifully performed, as well. He embodied his authority, with focused political purpose aimed at the middle class. This got me thinking. As a sociologist, I find public middle class talk confusing, though over the years I have worked to understand the politics. I think last night it became clear, both the politics and the sociology.

Obama is seeking to sustain his new governing coalition, with the Democratic majority in the Senate, and the bi-partisan coalition in the House, although he is working to form the coalition more aggressively than I had expected. He is addressing the House through “the people,” with their middle class identities, aspirations and fears.

In my last post, I observed and then suggested:

“Obama’s recent legislative victories included Republican votes on the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling. I believe he will talk about the economy in such a way that he strengthens his capacity to draw upon this new governing coalition. He will do it in the name of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class. This is the formulation of Obama for ordinary folk, the popular classes, the great bulk of the demos, the people. In this speech and in others, they are the subjects of change, echoing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: government of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, by the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, for the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class.”

Americans in large numbers think of themselves as being middle class, though this is hardly an identity that distinguishes much. The middle class, in the American imagination, ranges from people who barely sustain themselves to people who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, own multiple homes and all the latest consumer trophies. The imagined middle class includes all the workers who earn a living wage in a factory, and the owners of the factory, and the managers and clerks in between. If Marx were alive, he would roll over in his grave. This American sociological imagination seems to be an illusion, a case of false consciousness if there ever was one. The puzzle: “What is the matter with Kansas?

Yet, I think it was quite clear last night that the way the middle class is imagined opens American politics. Both Obama and Marco Rubio (in his Republican response) delivered their messages in the name of the middle class. While Rubio used it to denounce Obama, big government, taxing of the wealthy and spending for the needy, Obama invoked the great middle class to defend and propose programs that clearly serve “the middle class” directly, especially Social Security and Medicare, but also aid to education, infrastructure investments and the development of jobs. The undeserving poor loomed behind Rubio’s middle class, (and made explicit in Rand Paul’s Tea Party response), while those who need some breaks and supports were the base of Obama’s middle class. Thus, the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, as I anticipated, was Obama’s touchstone.

I, along with many progressive friends, have been impatient with all the talk about the middle class over the years. I wondered: where are the poor and the oppressed? In this State of the Union, the President made clear that they are central to his concern: an endangered middle class, both those who have been down so long that they haven’t been able to look up, and those who through recent experience know that they and their children are descending. Obama spoke to both groups, the frightened middle class, working people who have experienced rapid downward mobility, and those who have long been excluded from work that pays sufficiently to live decently.

Obama, using straightforward prose, addressed the members of Congress through this middle class. He advocated for “manufacturing innovation institutes,” for universal high quality pre-schools, strengthening the link between high school education and advanced technical training, addressing the costs and benefits of higher education, and raising the minimum wage. In other words, along with his discussion of Medicare, Social Security and Obamacare, he raised the immediate economic concerns of a broad swath of the American public. Noteworthy is that the concerns of the “aspiring middle class” (i.e. poor folk) were central in his presentation.

And then there was the passion focused on immigration, voting rights and gun violence. The closing crescendo, with Obama calling for a vote from Congress on gun violence, dramatically referred back to Obama’s opening, calling for concerted bi-partisan action on the crises of our time. As I heard it, this was about gun violence and its victims, but also the victims of Congressional inaction on jobs and the economy, on the sequester, on the need to invest in our future, i.e. on pressing issues concerning the middle class and those who aspire to be in the middle class. The closing was powerfully delivered, as the response to the delivery was even more powerful. As Obama takes his message to the country in the coming days, and as Democrats and Republicans start negotiations about the budget, I think that there is a real possibility that the coalition that formed in negotiating the resolution to the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling conflicts may very well lead to necessary action, at least to some degree, and they will be debating about the right things, at last.

Obama’s deeds don’t always match his words. Thus, he is a hypocrite and worse: a corporate stooge, the commander and chief of the prison industrial complex, and a war criminal. This is the sort of judgment one hears from the left. It seems this was the ground of Cornel West’s recent expression of self-righteous anger. And this, I believe, is all the result of a lack of understanding about the relationship between politics as a vocation and the art of protest.

In my last post, I expressed my indignation, my criticism of West and this sort of criticism (not for the first time, and certainly not the last). It is with the same concern that I have regretted the lost opportunities of Occupy Wall Street, which had real prospects to expand its influence, but fled instead, for the most part, into utopian fantasies and irrelevance. In Weber’s terms OWS activists chose completely the ethics of ultimate ends and fled responsibility, the articulation of the dreams over consequential actions. For me personally, the saddest manifestation of this was in the events of Occupy New School and its aftermath. Students and colleagues posturing to express themselves, to reveal their sober judgment of the realistic or their credentials as true radicals had little or nothing to do with the important ideas and actions of OWS, centered on the concerns of the 99% and the call for equality and a decent life for the 99%.

But my hope springs eternal. Perhaps with Obama’s new inauguration the protesters will get it.

A friend on my Facebook page summed up the problem. “It’s really difficult to be on the left of the current White House in the US nowadays.” Apparently hard, I think, because both easy full-throated opposition and full-throated support don’t make sense. Binary opposition is off the table. Struggles for public visibility of political concerns and consequential action are the order of the day. It’s difficult but far from impossible. Politicians will do their jobs, well or poorly, but so will social protesters. The key to successful protest, it seems to me, is that it responds to public opinion, pushing it forward, as it pushes forward politicians.

Take, for example, the problem of guns and gun violence in America today. Look at the recent demonstration in Washington, as depicted in Jo Freeman’s photos accompanying this text. I think of this demonstration as a case study of a sound answer to the classic question: “What is to be done?” Make visible and embody the progressive agenda, coordinate when possible with potential real change in public opinion and the laws of the land.

For a long time when it came to guns, there was a paradox. While most of the population favored reasonable gun control, those who opposed this were much more willing to vote on the issue, and they were well organized through the leadership of the National Rifle Association and its corporate patrons in the gun industry.

And things got worse. Slowly, this paradox shifted. Being more active, visible and consequential at the polls, gun advocates changed hearts and minds. The absence of serious opposition to their position (the Democrats, including Obama became all but silent on the issue of gun violence) let the pro gun position to prevail. Public opinion shifted from a concern about gun violence toward a concern about gun rights.

But now, there is a chance to turn the tide again. The President has played a leading role. Obama clearly is against the gun culture with its cult of violence. His forceful response to the Newtown massacre demonstrates this. Although he says he supports the individual’s gun rights and the Supreme Court’s recent reading of the Second Amendment, I, along with the NRA, have my doubts as to whether he is completely sincere about this. His is a political calculation, which the demonstrators don’t and shouldn’t accept.

But, nonetheless, the time seems right and Obama realizes that the nation was as shocked as he was by Newtown. He is clearly pushing to put gun control again on the agenda, now cleverly packaged as gun safety. He is calculating, political, searching to do the possible, and if he fails legislatively, he still seeks to push forward a change in public concern.

Of course, the push back was quick in coming. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association spouted his convoluted fact free arguments almost immediately and continues doing so, “manhandling facts and logic” at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, as it was put in the Washington Post. Pro gun advocates are rallying nationwide. State legislators are even preparing state laws that would criminalize the enforcement of federal gun safety laws within their borders.

Clearly, meaningful gun control legislation is far from assured. The politicians must argue the issue, but the public demand for change of gun culture and gun violence is even more important. The demand must be visibly present, as in the D.C. demonstration, pushing in a progressive direction, supporting the politicians when they can, being critical when they must.

I imagine similar demonstrations in the coming months on immigration, drone warfare and on issues that assure that the promises of the Obama’s Inaugural Address are moved forward. Closing the gap between Obama’s words and his practice is not only his responsibility.

I know from personal experience about the long-run suffering inflicted by gun deaths. I was not quite three years old when my father was killed, in November, 1945, by a fellow American soldier test firing a souvenir Lugar in the barracks. He had survived the war, but not the peace that followed. That shot has echoed down the decades in my family. I think I can still faintly hear it today, nearly 70 years later.

The cruelty of gun deaths comes partly from their absurd randomness. When I was a child, I imagined that my father was a war hero who had been killed in combat.  (How else could he have died?)  When I was an adolescent, I learned that the US Army reported that he was shot in a room where “men were working on guns.”  Later still, due to my mother’s obsessive persistence, we learned the even more prosaic truth:  he was seated, playing cards, when the unanticipated recoil of the Lugar directed a shot meant for the floorboards across the room and into his back.

Survivors of such capricious deaths cannot help being tormented by thoughts of alternative realities. In the case of my father:  If only the shooter had aimed in a different direction or taken into account the powerful recoil. If only the shot had gone twelve inches to the left (or the right). If only my father had been demobilized earlier.  If…if…if… Not far behind such thoughts lies the guilt felt by survivors.  For my mother, there was guilt about my conception. If only I had been born earlier, my father might not have been drafted in the first place.

My mother was haunted all her life by this death. Never able to find relief, she eventually took her own life, stipulating that she was to be buried beside her first husband.  Remarriage could not give the succor she needed:  As a Catholic woman with a young child, she faced a limited field of choice in the immediate post-war years, since a shortage of marriageable men was the inevitable consequence of the war. Her second marriage, to a man who had already been divorced twice (one more than she knew when she married him), lasted only six years, but left her with two more boys to raise. There was no further hope of companionship.

Premature deaths twist the emotional lives of families in ways that are very hard to discern, let alone straighten out. The familial black hole created by my father’s death, combined with my physical resemblance to him even as a child, meant that the adults around me encouraged me to see myself as his heir, an identification that I embraced eagerly, with little ability to anticipate all its implications. My father was described by all who knew him as a handsome, intelligent man, the first of his immigrant Sicilian family to try his luck in the American mainstream. In the abstract, not a bad example to follow.

The full meaning of this identity came home to roost during my 20s, when I was beset by intensifying anxieties and depression. As I approached 30, the age when my father was killed, I was visited by night terrors and the dread of early death. My understanding of what I was going through was limited (despite psychotherapy), and I perceived myself as mentally and physically ill. It was only when relief set in during my early 30s that I began to comprehend how my torment was connected to a death more than a quarter century in the past.

I feel I can now, at the age of 70, declare that the wounds that stem directly or indirectly from that gun death have healed.  It took many years of psychotherapy, and a very loving marriage. But based on my family’s experience, I think I am safe in predicting that for most of the survivors of recent gun massacres, in Aurora, Newtown, and now Webster, NY, the sadness will never fully dissipate.

My experience has led me to strong, strong support for gun control. A civilized society doesn’t allow private individuals to gather weaponry so that they can wreak violence on unsuspecting fellow citizens. The only sane course is to restrict access to very lethal weaponry such as automatic guns and to require the same sort of regulation of gun owners that we require of car drivers.

As a social scientist, I am trained to understand the way things actually work and to avoid projecting idealizations onto the social world.  The vision of the National Rifle Association and its supporters, of near-universal armament, so that for instance guards (or even teachers) can shoot it out in school hallways with intruders, is such an idealization. There is in fact no existing society that is so heavily armed (aside perhaps from the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, but is this an example we should want to follow?). Hence, the NRA project is based on a theory about how such a society would work, not the evidence of how one really does work.

In truth, we are already the most heavily armed society that has ever existed.  Currently, some 300 million guns are in private hands in the United States, almost one for every person living in our borders.  If widespread gun ownership inhibited violence, we should be a very safe society. But we are not:  We suffer a much higher rate of homicide due to guns and much more frequent gun massacres than any other western society. In comparison to some countries with very restrictive laws, such as Great Britain, the disparities approach a hundredfold.

The NRA and many of its supporters imagine a society of massive gun ownership, peopled by responsible armed citizens who use their weapons only to protect themselves, their families and their neighbors. A realistic glance at how weapons are actually figure in daily life in the United States exposes the fantastical aspects of this idea. Instead of prudent shooters, we have, just to take examples from recent months: parents who kill their children by accident, as happened when a gun being sold by a father discharged in the truck where his son was riding; individuals who use guns in ambiguous, but ultimately resolvable situations on the principle of “better him than me,” such as the killing of Trayvon Martin; and others who, in a moment of fury, impulsively shoot, as in the killing of a black teen in Florida over loud music.

In an ordinary year, some 30 thousands Americans are killed by guns (most, admittedly, by suicide), and 75 thousand are injured. Our overall rate of gun deaths (per 100,000) places the U.S. in the top 15 nations worldwide, just behind South Africa and not far below Mexico.

I acknowledge that, in a country drenched with weapons, meaningful gun control will not be easy to achieve. But the idea that the proliferation of guns forces the rest of us to arm ourselves moves us further in the direction of an insane, unworkable vision. More guns will not protect us, but worsen the violence and spread the suffering of gun deaths.

One of the truisms of the Internet Age is what has become known as Goodwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Let us turn to the Third Reich in Connecticut.

The reason that Americans permit the tragedy of Sandy Hook to occur year after doleful year has nothing to do with the fear of home invasion. It has nothing to do with cocaine-soaked gangs. It has nothing to do with the love of hiding in a duck blind. It has all to do with George III, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. This is the half-hidden secret behind the National Rifle Association’s passion and it needs to be judged in its own terms.

The justification for the Second Amendment and the justification for opposition to such real and apparently rational limits on semi-automatic weapons is to keep power in the hands of the people. The local community is a bulwark of democracy. Just as the rest of the libertarian-blessed Bill of Rights is concerned with constraining the heavy hand of state control, so is the Second Amendment. The fantasy is Red Dawn as Groundhog Day. A demand for personal liberty led Charlton Heston to be willing to fight until “they” pry the gun from his “cold, dead hands.”

In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, of Aurora, of Tucson, of Virginia Tech, of Columbine the issue is trust. Can we trust that our American regime (or invaders from Venezuela or Mars) can eschew the temptations of tyranny? Does power corrupt absolutely? Although the National Rifle Association is loath to admit it, gun control depends on political theory. The reason for heavy personal artillery is not to provoke one’s children against a break-in by Spike or José, but to kill Sergeant Spike or Colonel José. We need an arsenal not to hunt Bambi, but Senator Bambi. And if the National Rifle Association did not fear public revulsion, this is the argument that they would make.

In fact, the argument is not entirely crazed. Some seventy-five years ago the brilliant German sociologist Norbert Elias wrote of the Civilizing Process. Examining history, Elias found that social interaction was becoming increasingly less violent. We – Europeans at least – seemed less given to violence. Modifications in the rules of sport – from rugby to boxing – supported his claims, as did the increasing objections to interpersonal violence and anger, now often defined as a crime or a mental illness. Publishing this claim in 1939 seemed to some as laughable. Munich was only yesterday. But Elias’s point was that private citizens allowed states to monopolize force and violence, opening them to dictatorships. It has been a trope, although an evaporating one, that the people need weapons to maintain freedom. Sic semper tyrannis is a phrase much treasured by Brutus, John Wilkes Booth, and Timothy McVeigh, but also by serious freedom fighters of various stripes.

Do guns in the hands of patriots prevent oppression in reality? Perhaps as much as canned goods in a bomb shelter. But they make for a comfy survivalist fairy tale. In 2012, American institutional capacity based upon a separation of power and a shared value consensus is more likely to dissuade Generalissimo Barack or Reichsführer Cheney.

Still, the discussion of how freedom is to be guaranteed is worth having: whether or not we choose to water the tree of liberty with our rebellious blood each generation, as Thomas Jefferson advised. And this discussion requires more candor than has been recently evident. Gun rights are, for good and for ill, about imaginings of rebellion. They are not about personal safety from wilding naïfs. The National Rifle Association is willfully and transparently disingenuous when they suggest that the answer to Sandy Hook is to have a policeman in every school, extending the reach of the state into largely placid corners of civil society. If the NRA were candid, they would add to their mantra of “more guns,” “less cops.” From this perspective, these twenty children who died in Newtown were bystanders, dying for the right for all to bear arms. The fact that few – even few gun owners – see this battle as an insistent and immediate reality means that the National Rifle Association must bob and weave, deny and dissemble.

In this, they have erased their libertarian birthright. Guns are necessary when freedom is at risk. But once a society is sufficiently secure to recognize other and better ways to insure freedom, including secure protections on privacy rights and the creation of spaces of free action outside the reach of forces of control, limits on weaponry can coexist with individual rights. With this commitment, the present collateral damage that finds children in pine boxes becomes a luxury that only the ludicrous could embrace.

While I take for granted that gun control is a proper response to the atrocity in Newtown, not all do. This is the second of a two part extended exchange (part 1, here ). My friend Thomas Cushman, who holds libertarian views, challenged me and proposed a different interpretation and a different course of action. I hope this will open a deeper deliberate discussion.

Tom: Jeff, I wonder if we as sociologists could bring some kind of understanding to this situation that does not sink down into the extreme positions on either side? Otherwise it’s just politics as usual. Consider, for instance, that Connecticut already has severe gun control measures. They did not stop the atrocity. Vermont is a state where any resident can buy as many guns, and as much ammunition as they want, carry concealed handguns, own assault rifles, and it has the lowest homicide rate in the country. I am not a fan of the gun culture by any stretch, but it seems shallow to imagine that some amorphous, state induced “gun control” is going to ever stop these kinds of things. As you know, the problem is cultural. We live in a degraded cultural environment full of simulated and prosthetic violence,. Our children, especially our boys, are immersed in violent culture produced by Hollywood. Why not start there?

Jeff: Agreed the problem at its base cultural. Gun culture, the culture of violence and its glorification.   And yes, violence in popular culture is a problem. But why have so many guns? I would like to work on all fronts. I would start with a discussion about gun controls in the political arena. Certainly some weapons shouldn’t be in private hands. Certainly, also, we should have a discussion about depictions of violence in films and music. If you want to start there, fine. Figure out how to address a degraded cultural environment, and do so. These discussions needn’t be in competition.

Tom:  There is a group of cultural producers who control the content of popular culture. They degrade the cultural environment with violence, yet,  many of them are liberals who clamor for gun control. That inconsistency bears as much scrutiny and critique as it is humanly possible to give….. To keep this on a positive note, we could do a study of how people react to events such as the CT shootings. I’ve become more and more vexed by trying to understand evil sociologically; the contingency and agency of it beguiles any explanatory/causative vocabulary. Theodicy seems better than sociology for me right now. I want to see cultural sociology address these issues. As for politics, I think a very appropriate action that would appeal to libertarians, conservatives, liberals –something everyone might like – would be to do a concentrated boycott of the next Hollywood film that glorifies violence. Everyone stays home and evokes the memory of those poor murdered children and their teachers and sends the message, without state intervention, that we’ve had enough. Ditto with the video games. Why not organize a “buy and burn day” nationwide? There is no censorship, just people using their 1st amendment rights to say “no more.”

Jeff: Hollywood liberals and conservatives make violent films. Why Hollywood liberals and not just Hollywood? I am not afraid of characterizations but of stereotypes. Last time I noticed Clint Eastwood was not a liberal. Nor are other heroes of violence whose names I don’t know. My ignorance about such cultural products is almost complete. I always boycott such products and recommend that all do. But I am rather convinced that gun violence occurs not by viewing films but by people having guns readily available, and I am not thinking about hunters in Vermont. Really why semi automatic weapons, handguns? Why not tanks and missiles?

Tom: I am trying to be a sociologist here. The fact is that most filmmakers and producers are on the political left. If they are truly concerned about violence, why do they continue to make films that saturate our children with it? It’s the hypocrisy that irks me. The cultivation hypothesis in media sociology is something I’ve taught for years: when the culture is saturated with violent depictions of murder and mayhem, people come to see it as normal and it provides the cultural base that activates action. That guns are are readily available makes it possible to translate more ideation into action. I agree with that. But my main point is this, sociologically: the ready availability of guns is not necessarily the main cause of massacres. I keep mentioning Vermont, because it is not all hunters, as you say, Jeff. The place is infested with guns. You can buy a gun, load it, conceal it and carry it, no permit, nothing. And huge numbers of people do. So the availability of guns has nothing to do with the rate of violence there: how do you explain that? If your theory that access to guns is the cause of violence, Vermont should be drowning in bloodshed, yet is has the lowest death by handgun rate in the nation. The person who committed these heinous acts in CT got his guns from his mother, who went through rigorous process to get them, permits, etc. Access was difficult. And he did not use assault weapons. One could also use the case of Brievik in Norway, one of the hardest place in the word to buy guns. I’m trying to understand this more sociologically?

Jeff: I too am trying and in fact am a sociologist. Most filmmakers are liberals, also a disproportionate number of Jews, but their work should not be reduced to their politics or their identity. Is there anything in the work that is a function of their politics or identity? My criticism of such reductionism has been central to my professional life as a sociologist of culture. As far as guns: we agree that the issue is cultural. For me the arguments for guns are pernicious. The arguments constitute a culture of violence: purported individual defense of the safety of the home and defense by oneself from state tyranny. These NRA positions are very dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than gun ownership. I think that having many guns at home make matters worse, as in the Newtown case. My fundamental concern is with the culture of guns in people’s lives, not as they and violence are fictively depicted. Though as I said, I agree it would be better to turn away from such depictions as individuals and as a society.

Tom: A libertarian would be as ferociously against the misuse of weapons to harm people as the liberal statist would. We live in a violent society where police powers are not sufficient to protect the basic right to life. The question is what we should do about that.

As with many others, I have been consumed by the tragedy in Newtown Connecticut. I wrote a post on Saturday, something I try not to do. Signed a couple of petitions (see here and here). Watched the memorial service last night. Was moved and inspired by Obama’s speech.

It is at moments like this that I am relieved and proud that Barack Obama is president. He gave a powerful speech. He got to the heart of the matter. I am confident a real response to this tragedy will happen.

Moving from alarm, to depression to hope, I discussed with friends on Facebook the events as they have been unfolding. I think the discussions were informative and re-produce slightly edited versions here. The discussion crossed intellectual gated communities, an interesting exchange on my left was initiated by my Israeli friend, Orly Lubin, joined by American based friends Peter Manning, and Esther Kreider-Verhalle. In the second, from the more libertarian side of things, there was a civil exchange with my friend Tom Cushman, which I will post tomorrow. I hope we can continue these discussions at Deliberately Considered.

The discussion on the left was between those, including me, who saw a major change in Obama’s approach to leadership and gun policy, and those who see a pattern of compromise and ineffectiveness in domestic and foreign policy.

Orly: You Americans are the masters of understatements – Hannan and me were furious – between Jesus and god bless America, couldn’t hear the word “gun” nor the word “control” – but what do I know, don’t speak american, I guess.

Jeff: Yes, I think you don’t. Though I also don’t like certain religious aspects of American.

Orly: OK, I will stop assuming. I can understand.

Peter: I think this is at the Gettysburg address level. It was brilliant. The hard politics will come after this masterful speech. Wait and see.

Orly: Shoyn (really?), as they say in Yiddish, will wait and see. though waited for him in Israel for four years and saw nothing… and doubt I’ll see him do anything on that front during the magical “second term,” as well — what we are doing in the West Bank and Gaza is not that much different than Newtown.

Esther: “This is our first task, caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.” Obama should use whatever power his executive office holds, not just to engage, but to take action. And yes, very good speech. I realize that asking for less religion in it is not the American way….

Jeff: He may be himself clinging to his religion but he is moving against guns. He can’t do everything, i.e. there have been profound constraints on him in Israel Palestine, Orly.  But perhaps now, he is gaining power. This is indicated by how forcefully he is coming out on the domestic fiscal front, and now on guns.

Orly: OK, so I don’t understand Americneze. This is from a friend of mine, highly versed in american language: from an article on the Huffington Post:

“But like the three speeches before, the president stayed vague on the methods of seeing that change through. This could very well be out of a sense of proper setting. A vigil isn’t always the best time to make policy points. But that may not be much comfort to those who are tired of the debate being ducked.

Obama’s advocacy for gun control has, to this point, had an inverse relationship with his rise in elected politics. The state politician who once touted a comprehensive plan to get guns off the streets of Chicago was absent from the debates once he came to Washington. The Senate candidate who said it was a “scandal” that the assault weapons ban was allowed to lapse in 2004 became a president who pledged to pursue gun-control reform only within existing law.

Over time, caution was how the president became defined on the issue, his eloquent words of sympathy no longer sufficing.

‘The president’s tears were nice,” said Toby Hoover, director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, shortly after Obama addressed the Newtown shootings in a statement on Friday. Hoover lost her husband to gun violence when she was 30 years old, and was attending a candlelight vigil outside the White House gates. “But he was supposed to lead us. He told us that if we elected him, he’d give us hope. I need hope.’

See, this whole thing has become so utterly ridiculous…when you have to spend a bunch of your speech rattling off the names of other massacres and even that is a short and cursory list [“Well, I’ll stop there. If I went on listing other places with massacres, well, we’d be here all night!”] it just all sounds pointless and silly. And when you have this record of having been very pro gun control while a senator an a candidate then crept away from it the entire first term…well, come ON. And let’s be clear here: During obama’s first term, the only serious gun -related legislation that got passed was to permit guns to be carried in National Parks. Yes, now you can bring your AK-47 to yellowstone. Since you were trained in its use as a youngster, I’m sure this will make your visits to our fine national parks even more momentous. I realize that there are no Grizzly Bears in Israel–you folks don’t even have bison and let me tell you, as an American, I have been way too close to bison and they are creepy. Smell bad. You’ll WANT to pop them one. National animal, my ass! Also!! I do believe but check me on this, another fine piece of lawmaking since ’08 allows people to carry their concealed weapons into states that don’ot have conceal/carry laws. Something like that. Lucky us! Conceal your AK-47 and carry it to a National Park for a season of family fun; if that wildlife gets too crazy, you can blow it away. And let’s not get started on the ‘revised’ castle laws in Florida, Wyoming, and so on. You act edgy in a public place, i dont like your face, and I can blow you away and then claim self-defense.”

Please. This is all such crazyland stuff. Normal people would not be here. A normal country would not be here. Gettysburg shmettysburg.

Jeff: I think that Obama opened a door yesterday. He committed himself to action. His tactical maneuvers of the past are irrelevant now. I can’t be sure what he will do, but do know that after the speech many politicians are speaking out in favor of gun control. A decade of silence by the Democrats is over and as I said, Obama can’t turn back. If that isn’t an important move, Orly, I don’t know what is. And more could come.

Peter: This speech was a ‘set-up’ for later action. Who can criticize looking after children? Then the gun people will have little ground on which to stand: defend what? Freedom bought with the blood of children massacred almost before our eyes? Why ‘defend freedom’ with guns?Surely, it is an abstract concept; not reduced to having “my guns”‘ Obama’s stance makes concrete the objections to ideological, reactionary and primitive thinking.

This time it was in a Connecticut elementary school, not very far from my home. The local and national news together are overwhelmingly depressing. I feel despair and powerless: such brutality, and Americans have kept on arming themselves, with support for gun control diminishing.

Why? Perhaps it is because too many of us confuse fictions with facts? On this issue the NRA view of the world seems to dominate. Consider this blast from Deliberately Considered’s past, the story of a preteen sharpshooter defending her home in Butte Montana. Gun advocates make up there own facts to justify their position that guns yield personal and public safety.

A fact free world provides the grounds upon which outrageous judgments are made. Charles Blow cited one today:

“Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, wasted no time trying to pin Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates. ThinkProgress quoted a statement of his that read, in part: ‘Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.’ ”

How is it possible for someone to imagine let alone utter such words? Following their logic, and the sort of pseudo-evidence it is based on, “the fictoid from out west,” perhaps the answer to school violence is arming kindergarten kids. David Frum, indeed, in a tweet sarcastically declared: “Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.”

And then there is the magical power of prayer. Mike Huckabee: “We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Gail Collins, my favorite columnist, turned off her sharp wit today to express bitter outrage, reflecting on this and other statements, “looking for America.” She didn’t like what she was seeing.

I want to believe that change is coming. I think there is an opportunity. I am convinced that the election results represented a change in American public opinion and commonsense. Yet, I know that the changing opinion has not included guns and a serious critical response to the violence in American life up to this point. Public discussion has shifted in the past twenty years from gun violence and control to the second amendment and gun rights.

I think that it is in this context that President Obama’s moving response yesterday should be judged. Heartfelt and sincere, he expressed the nation’s grief, but he also promised a change. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” I wonder whether this is a real opening to a renewed public debate.

There are good reasons to be skeptical. Since Gore v. Bush in 2000, Democrats, including Obama, have been increasingly reluctant to take up gun control. But Obama suggested that he may move against this reluctance, pointing to the hard facts of atrocity.

Now is an opportunity for leadership. If Obama in fact does address the issue of gun violence and control in the coming days, it will matter. It will start a serious accounting, providing the opportunity for citizens and their leadership to think beyond fictoids and nutty opinion. I hope this will include both Republicans and Democrats. News flash – Rupert Murdoch just tweeted for gun controls. People are pushing as I write this post. (See this and this, I am sure there are other important efforts.) Obama has had good political reasons to be cautious in the recent past, but elections matter only if and when they are acted upon.

Matthew LaClair is a student at Eugene Lang College.  He attended Jeff’s course this semester on Democracy in America.   He is also a radio correspondent for WBAI in NYC. He sends in this report of a fictoid from the Heartland.

I received the following chain e-mail from a relative of mine. I thought of it as a good example of dangerous fictoids, because after I checked the story out, I found it has simply never happened. Here, read the unedited text of the e-mail:

Thought  for the day: 

Calling an illegal alien an ‘undocumented immigrant’ is like calling a drug dealer an ‘unlicensed pharmacist’

.

Have you ever wondered why good stuff never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, or ABC news………an 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended her home, and herself….

…against two murderous, illegal immigrants…

…and she wins, She is still alive.

Now that is Gun Control!

BUTTE, MONTANA

Shotgun preteen vs.  Illegal alien Home Invaders:
 Butte, Montana November 5,  2009

Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26,  probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home. 

It seems  the two crooks never learned two things:


 1 – They were in Montana 


2 – Patricia has been a clay shooting champion since she was nine.

 Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father’s room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.

 Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor and was the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old’s knee crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.

 When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive.

 It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber handgun he had taken from another home invasion robbery. The victim of that robbery, 50-year-old David 0Burien, was not so lucky. He died from stab wounds to the chest.

I like this kind of e-mail.

American citizens defending themselves and their homes.

And here is what I wrote in response to the email.
:

I can tell you exactly why this never made the mainstream news. 

Most of the major networks such as NBC, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, etc. report on news. I.E. things that actually happened.

 Read this story from the Montana Standard:

A dramatic story about a shooting that supposedly happened in Butte last year is nothing more than an urban myth.
 The bogus story has been circulating for the past year on Internet blogs and Web sites concerning a girl shooting two men who broke into her Butte home in November 2006. 
According to the fabricated story, an 11-year-old Butte girl shot two “illegal aliens” with a shotgun after they broke into her home. The shooting supposedly took place on Nov. 5, 2006, according to Internet posts.
 When asked about the authenticity of the events described in this story, Butte-Silver Bow Sheriff John Walsh told The Montana Standard in an earlier interview that his office never investigated such an incident. 
“This never happened,” Walsh said.
 The story claims the girl shot and killed the two intruders while she was home alone. The story doesn’t provide a street address or attribute the information to any official sources.
 Walsh brushed off the story of an urban myth. 
“It’s amazing how these things get around,” he said.
 Numerous people from all over the United States have contacted The Montana Standard in the past year via e-mail or phone to verify if the story was true. The story is often given the headline “Home Invasion Gone Wrong.”  A recent search for this story on the Internet search engine Google.com returned with more than 400 hits. 
The story has been printed as fact on some anti-gun control and anti-immigration Web sitesricia Harrington, who shoots and kills the two “illegal aliens” identified as Ralphel Resindez and Enrico Garza.