“A Blurry Mess”: In Iowa, Blind Residents Can Carry Firearms In Public
An Iowa law that permits legally blind residents to carry firearms in public has ignited debate between law enforcement officials and activists, the Des Moines Register reports.
As it currently stands, “state law does not allow sheriffs to deny an Iowan the right to carry a weapon based on physical ability.” But law enforcement officials are concerned about public safety. From the Register:
Private gun ownership — even hunting — by visually impaired Iowans is nothing new. But the practice of visually impaired residents legally carrying firearms in public became widely possible thanks to gun permit changes that took effect in Iowa in 2011.
“It seems a little strange, but the way the law reads, we can’t deny them (a permit) just based on that one thing,” said Sgt. Jana Abens, a spokeswoman for the Polk County sheriff’s office, referring to a visual disability.
Polk County officials say they’ve issued weapons permits to at least three people who can’t legally drive and were unable to read the application forms or had difficulty doing so because of visual impairments.
According to Chris Danielsen, the public relations director of The National Federation of the Blind, “There’s no reason solely on the (basis) of blindness that a blind person shouldn’t be allowed to carry a weapon.” Danielson leaves the issue of public safety to common sense: “Presumably they’re going to have enough sense not to use a weapon in a situation where they would endanger other people, just like we would expect other people to have that common sense.”
Other advocates argue that it’s just an issue of hands-on training, though this is not currently required by state law.
Federal law does not prohibit blind people from owning guns, but several states have extra provisions, like vision tests, which applicants are required to pass in order to obtain a permit. Iowa does not have a similar requirement.
“At what point do vision problems have a detrimental effect to fire a firearm?” asked Delaware County Sheriff John LeClere, who clarified that he’s not an expert in vision, but “if you see nothing but a blurry mass in front of you, then I would say you probably shouldn’t be shooting something.”
By: Prachi Gupta, Salon, September 8, 2013
“Not An Isolated Incident”: Washington Bridge Collapse Another Sign That America’s Infrastructure Is In Bad Shape
On Thursday evening, an Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington state collapsed, sending two cars into the water and injuring three people. So far no fatalities have been reported. Authorities don’t yet know what caused the collapse.
Another bridge also collapsed in Texas on Thursday after catching fire. The fire burned too hot for firefighters to put out, so they let it burn. It was a railway bridge over the Colorado river and repairing it could cost $10 million.
The bridge in Washington was listed as “functionally obsolete,” which does not mean it was considered structurally deficient or unsafe, but rather that it was built to standards that are no longer used and may have had inadequate lane widths or vertical clearance. As Yahoo! News reported, the bridge was built in 1955 and had a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100, “well below the statewide average rating of 80.”
Unfortunately, these bridge collapses are not isolated incidents. There are 759 bridges in the state that have a lower sufficiency rating than the one that fell apart. More than 350 bridges in Washington are considered structurally deficient, meaning they require repair or replacement of a component, although are not necessarily considered in danger of collapse. More than 1,500 are considered functionally obsolete.
Overall, one in nine of the country’s bridges are rated structurally deficient by the American Society of Civil Engineer’s yearly report card in American infrastructure. The average age for the nation’s bridges is 42 years. This netted the country a C+ rating on its bridges, which is mediocre. To upgrade all of the deficient ones, the U.S. would need to invest $20.5 billion annually.
Yet only $12.8 billion is being spent on bridge updates currently. The country’s infrastructure only got a total grade of D+, a poor rating. Overall, the country needs to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it into the 21st century.
Investment, however, has been moving in the opposite direction. Public spending on infrastructure as a percentage of GDP has dropped dramatically in recent years, falling to the lowest level in two decades, as Joe Weisenthal pointed out. The U.S. is only expected to spend about a third of what the report card calls for by 2020.
While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or 2009 stimulus bill, made infrastructure improvements, that money has mostly been used up. But as that package of spending proved, investment in infrastructure not only upgrades roads and bridges to make them safer, it also puts people back to work and helps improve the economy.
President Obama has proposed further stimulus spending on infrastructure, but his proposals have been repeatedly blocked by Republicans in Congress. Yet America’s borrowing costs are extremely low and deficits are shrinking, so there is no time like the present to invest in upgrading our infrastructure.
By: Bryce Covert, Think Progress, May 24, 2013
“The Right To Police Indifference”: American Citizens, Especially The Marginalized, Have No Legal Right To Police Protection
When you call 911 in an emergency, the police don’t have to respond to your call.
If someone breaks into your house or your partner threatens to hurt you, the police don’t have to respond. If you report a neighbor’s continual slashing of your tires, the cops can ignore your calls. If a cross burns in your front yard, no one from the precinct must investigate. Despite all talk of “taxpayer dollars,” your crisis is completely optional to law enforcement, even in the worst of circumstances. The public can protest and bewail this seeming governmental indifference, but no citizen is legally entitled to police protection.
Police indifference is the under-examined tragedy of the Cleveland kidnappings, in which Ariel Castro allegedly confined and raped three women for a decade in a nondescript house in a poor neighborhood. Neighbors attest to calling the police on several occasions. They recalled seeing naked girls in Castro’s yard leashed like dogs. They also saw women beating on closed windows. As long as the neighbors are relaying things accurately — and they might not be — it seems the police either made cursory glances or failed to show up at all.
But here’s the thing: According to a Supreme Court case, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, police have no legal obligation to respond to anyone’s calls, even in matters of life and death.
On June 22, 1999 in Castle Rock, Colo., Jessica Gonzales’ three daughters were abducted from her yard at 5:15 p.m. by her estranged husband, Simon. The couple had begun divorce proceedings, and Simon violated a restraining order by taking the girls outside of his specified visitation hours. Unable to locate Simon and the girls, Jessica called the local police at 7:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m., 10:10 p.m., and 12:15 a.m., following up with a visit to the station at 12:40 a.m. At 3:20 a.m., Simon appeared at the police station brandishing a gun, resulting in a fatal shootout. When the police checked his truck, they found the bodies of the three daughters in the back.
The police ignored all of Jessica’s calls and her visit to the station. Because Simon was allowed to visit the children, the police saw no need for action, even though his “visit” violated the restraining order. The police, Jessica recalled, felt that “he’s their father. It’s okay for him to be with them.” After her third call, they forbid her from calling until midnight.
Jessica’s protection order featured a mandatory arrest clause in the event Simon violated his visitation scheme. Mandatory, to a reasonable person, entails an imperative not open for interpretation. Still, the police viewed the protection order as optional.
The Supreme Court agreed, holding that Jessica had no enforceable right to protection, despite the arrest clause. Justice Antonin Scalia saw no contradiction in the police inaction, arguing that “a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes.” Castle Rock’s indifference to Jessica’s pleas and dead children falls under this constitutional veil of “discretion.”
Assessing the urgency of emergency is everyday police triage. Bank robberies get priority over cats in trees, and violent behavior takes precedence over noise complaints. Threats of harm are more important to police than residential minutiae, and discretion allows the department to deploy officers effectively and efficiently.
But there is a dark side to police discretion, and it disproportionately affects disadvantaged groups. Domestic violence calls are often dismissed as private matters between lovers, and women’s problems can be viewed as hysterical theatrics by male officers. Response time in wealthier neighborhoods far outstrips those of poor communities. And notoriously, “discretion” stands as the primary justification for racial profiling.
A 1996 study on police responses to crime found that the race of the victim and offender significantly affected police responsiveness. White victims received quicker responses and better follow-up. Black victims fared much worse. Differential racial outcomes stem from discretion, which plainly means the issues police find attention-worthy. Sadly, this turns objectively illegal crimes into subjectively important options.
It’s not entirely surprising that demographics influence access to public services. What is more surprising — and shocking — is the categorical protection of clear police ignorance, which puts police departments beyond reproach. Police are generally freed of responsibility for the citizens they are supposed to protect.
For over 10 years, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight were hidden in plain sight, but outside the scope of police interest. When neighbors called for help, their pleas apparently fell on deaf ears. It’s clear that citizens — especially the marginalized — have no legal right to police protection. If you are a female resident of a poor, minority community in one of the poorest cities in America, you’re on your own.
By: Kevin Noble Maillard, The Week, May 17, 2013
“From Poor Regulation To Terrorism”: Texas’ Wild West Approach To Protecting Public Health And Safety
You might think the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, that leveled the town and killed 14 people would have given pause to those conservative policymakers and boosters in the Lone Star State who proudly boast of a “Texas Way” in which job-creators aren’t hassled by pointy-headed bureaucrats and regulators or income taxes or any of those other new-fangled socialist devices. But no: under the leadership of Gov. Rick Perry, we learn from a New York Times story today, Texas government and business officials are going out of their way to reiterate that this is a place where the Bidnessman walks tall, and poor living standards and high workplace risks are just the price of keeping job creators fat and happy.
Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.
But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs….
“The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,” said Thomas O. McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an expert on regulation.
So I’d bet today’s news that Texas law enforcement officials have launched a criminal investigation based on reports that federal agents found bomb-making materials in the possession of a paramedic who was on the scene in West is going to generate a lot of excitement in the state’s conservative circles. True, the suspect who was arrested by the ATF isn’t an Arab or even a Chechen, and no one knows at this point if he had anything to do with the explosion, and if so, what his motives might have been.
But Lord a-mercy, wouldn’t it be nice if it was a terrorist and not an industry or lawmakers or regulators we ought to be looking at in connection with this tragedy? The very possibility must be worth toasting in certain circles during today’s Texas happy hours.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2013
“Common Sense Legislation”: To Get Better Gun Control, Don’t Use The Phrase
We can now be confident that last week’s massacre of 26 women and children at an elementary school in Newtown, CT, will not be swept under the carpet like so many mass shootings of the past.
President Barack Obama said Dec. 19 that he would act “without delay” after hearing from Vice President Joe Biden’s task force in January. We’ll probably spend much of the winter and spring debating Obama’s anti-violence proposal.
The question now is what the president — and the rest of us — can do to make sure that the National Rifle Association doesn’t once again intimidate enough members of Congress to gut the bill. The only answer is to build a smarter, more effective movement for common-sense gun laws than we have today, which means lots of meetings, marches, TV ads, door knocks and social- media campaigns.
Only the technology of movement-building has changed. Abolitionism, women’s suffrage, civil rights, conservation — every great stride forward in U.S. history has come from ordinary people defying the odds and bringing organized pressure to bear on politicians.
Any movement starts with its core legislative agenda. In this case, that means:
– Banning all assault weapons and high-capacity magazines for everyone except the military.
– Requiring instant background checks on all gun purchases, including those at gun shows and online.
– Providing law enforcement full access to all state and local databases on felons and the mentally ill.
– Making illegal gun trafficking a felony.
Until now, the NRA has disgraced itself by blocking each of these no-brainer reforms, mostly by putting tens of millions of dollars behind its lies. The best thing Obama did in his news conference was his attempt to drive a wedge between NRA members, most of whom favor reasonable gun-safety laws, and their hardline officers and board of directors.
With the NRA’s news conference on Dec. 21, we’re about to see if its tardy response to the Newtown shootings plays with the public. I have my doubts. Once a bully is exposed in harsh daylight, it can be harder to instill fear again.
To break the NRA’s stranglehold, reformers need to shake off the hangdog fatalism of the past. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell often points out that he won three statewide elections against the gun lobby in a state that is second only to Texas in NRA membership.
Democrats are too worried about senators from Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, Louisiana and West Virginia up for re-election in 2014. Even if many rural counties are out of reach, dozens of others in suburban areas are full of moderate and compassionate people who have not been approached imaginatively on the gun issue.
Doing so requires reframing the debate with new language, always an essential weapon in politics. That means retiring “gun control” (the “control” part is threatening to gun owners) and replacing it with “gun safety,” “anti-violence regulation,” “military weapons for the military only” and — on every occasion — “common sense.”
Mom-and-apple-pie appeals always work best. So far, with anti-gun groups starved for money, they haven’t been widely tried.
In the meantime, liberals need to downplay accurate but politically useless arguments. It’s true that violent videogames don’t cause shooting rampages, that state laws allowing concealed weapons are a menace, and that guns in the home are more likely to be used in an accidental shooting than to protect against burglars. But emphasizing these points just exacerbates cultural differences and does nothing to advance next year’s legislation.
What would? The most heartening remarks of the week came from people such as West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who was elected in 2010 with an ad featuring him firing a gun. Now he believes it’s time to rethink some positions. A couple of country stars on his side (hello, Toby Keith) would help. So would anti-violence Super PACs (yet to be formed) airing attack ads in suburban media markets that thrust the NRA on the defensive, where it has never been.
The NRA spent more than $11 million on behalf of candidates in the 2012 cycle, a relatively small sum by today’s standards. Let’s see what happens when it has to respond to a heavy ad barrage next year that includes families talking about their dead children.
The president’s role — better late than never — is to mobilize his base. His 2012 grassroots political organization, the best ever built, raised more than $1 billion, amassed more than 15 million email addresses, contacted tens of millions of voters and recruited a million volunteers in battleground states.
Now the Obama team has the passionate issue it needs to target and organize crucial suburban congressional districts. If all House Democrats vote for the landmark bill next spring — a reasonable supposition — Obama would need the support of 17 House Republicans for it to pass.
The only thing they or other members care about is their own political survival. So the question for them is this: What’s the use of a 100 percent NRA rating in the Republican primary if it’s going to doom you in the general?
I know, I know. This sounds like a fantasy. The gun lobby likes to point to the elections of 1994 and 2000, when several Democrats who backed the assault-weapons ban lost their seats. No federal gun laws have been passed since. New ones at the state level have all been for the worse.
But U.S. politics is in a state of transition. Obama won a solid majority in November. His army — not the NRA’s — is the one that’s on the march. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was so unspeakable that it may yet help a whole new generation of political activists to find their voice.
By: Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg View, The National Memo, December 21, 2012
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