Opinion
America's gun disease is a national security issue
The spate of shootings in the US and the lack of political will to tackle gun control shows the country as a basket case, not a model state
If this isn't a matter of national security, what is? When 13 people end up dead at a US military base, that surely crosses the threshold – putting America's problem with guns into the category reserved for threats to the mortal safety of the nation. At its narrowest, Monday's massacre at the Washington navy yard is a national security issue because it involved hostile entry into what was meant to be a secure military facility. Plenty will now focus on how a man twice arrested in gun-related incidents was able to gain such easy access to the nerve centre of the US navy. There will be inquiries into the entry-pass system, use of contractors and the like.
But that would be to miss the wider point. America's gun sickness – which has turned massacres of this kind into a fairly regular, rather than exceptionally rare occurrence – endangers the US not solely because it can lead military personnel to lose their lives, nor even because it can lead to the murder of schoolchildren, as it did at Sandy Hook elementary school last year, or the death of young movie-goers, as it did in Aurora, Colorado, also last year – dreadful though those losses are.
The foreign policy experts who gather in the thinktanks and congressional offices not far from the navy yard often define national security to encompass anything that touches on America's standing in the world. That ranges from its ability to project military force across the globe to its attractiveness, its "soft power". For decades, this latter quality has been seen as one of the US's primary assets, central to its ability to lead and persuade other nations.
But America's gun disease diminishes its soft power. It makes the country seem less like a model and more like a basket case, afflicted by a pathology other nations strive to avoid. When similar gun massacres have struck elsewhere – including in Britain – lawmakers have acted swiftly to tighten controls, watching as the gun crime statistics then fell. In the decade after the rules were toughened in Australia in 1996, for example, firearm-related homicides fell by 59%, while suicides involving guns fell by 65%.
But the US stays stubbornly where it is, refusing to act. When President Obama last tried, following the deaths of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook at the end of 2012, his bill fell at the first senate hurdle. He had not proposed banning a single weapon or bullet – merely expanding the background checks required of someone wanting to buy a gun. But even that was too much. The national security pundits who worry how a US president is perceived when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Syrians abroad should think how it looks when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Americans at home.
On guns, the US – so often the world leader in innovation and endeavour – is the laggard, stuck at the bottom of the global class. Bill Clinton perfectly distilled the essence of soft power when he said in 2008, "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." He was right. But every time a disturbed or angry individual is able to vent his rage with an assault weapon, killing innocents with ease, the power of America's example fades a little more.
@Freedland
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report
Posted on 16 September 2013 by dana1981 The fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is due out on September 27th, and is expected to reaffirm with growing confidence that humans are driving global warming and climate change. In…
[Image via Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons licensed]
Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction
Novelists such as Colm Tóibín and Naomi Alderman are breathing new life into the gospels
If you haven't read Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary, you may know it as the short one on the Booker shortlist (and therefore not a bad place to start). It has only 104 pages. But what makes it really striking – in addition to its compelling narrator, lyrical physical evocation of its time and place and bombshell ending – is the fact that it is another novel about Jesus.
Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction. Novelists can't get enough of him. In September 2012, Naomi Alderman's The Liars' Gospel was published – a month before Tóibín's book. The year before that came Richard Beard's Lazarus is Dead, and before that Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. More allegorically, JM Coetzee's Childhood of Jesus appeared earlier this year.
"There have definitely been more novels about Jesus recently," says Stuart Kelly, who is on the judging panel for this year's Booker. He thinks they might be a reaction to the current situation in the Middle East, or "the gauche and strident atheism of the likes of [Richard] Dawkins. People can argue what they like about the new atheism, but what it doesn't do is explain why this story has had such a hold over the human imagination for 2,000 years."
So why has it? Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has read the novels by Pullman, Jim Crace (whose 1997 book Quarantine is about Jesus's 40 days in the desert) and some of the Coetzee. He thinks the story in the gospels intrigues novelists because: "It is a story freighted with the most immense irony imaginable – the decisive embodiment of divine action and purpose and power in the human world turns out to be not only a wandering peasant shaman, but a figure who fails to persuade and ends up humiliated and executed."
"Decisive" these portraits are not, however. Tóibín's Mary is determined not to oblige the gospel-writers seeking to preserve the teachings of her son (she can't bring herself to say his name). They seem more interested in the story than in the truth, and Mary's son comes across as an annoying figure with a loud voice and weird clothes who takes up too much pavement space – a sort of first-century hipster. Alderman's Miryam differs by obliging a follower by telling him what he wants to hear about her pregnancy. "She knows that the story she is telling is a lie, but she says it anyway … because it brings her comfort to see that he believes it."
As that last sentence suggests, the writing of the gospels is woven into the plot of both Alderman's and Tóibín's books. Perhaps the story of Jesus's life bears novelistic reiteration partly because it has always been told by multiple voices – not only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but many more whose versions were not included in the Bible.
That duplication and overlapping of narratives must create holes and folds in which novelists can work, to narrativise the contradictions and build new worlds in the gaps. After all, each telling carries its own truths, and the collective effect of their variation is to suggest there is no such thing as a gospel truth – just lots of gospel stories.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
How the U.S. government inadvertently created Wikileaks
I was in Germany for Chaos Congress 2009, a hacker conference, and after attending a series of talks I was headed back to my hotel when I spotted Julian Assange. This predated my working as a project manager at DARPA…
Google Glass looks silly now, but we'll all be wearing mini-computers soon
An open-mind about new technology will help lead us to discover endless possibilities for its use in our daily lives
I have a nostalgic memory from my childhood that conjures up that youthful sensation of limitlessness, of the feeling that the day will be so long and full of opportunity that it couldn't possibly be filled.
It was a full hour until my best friend was due to arrive and, I'd spent a restless minute or two fidgeting by the front door in anticipation. To an eight-year-old, an hour seemed like waiting until the end of time.
Then, time seemed elongated, as if without all that assumed knowledge and the prejudices of experience, the perception of time was changed. This is a blissful, open-mindedness with which to view the world, learning by doing, getting stuck in. But that openness of mind seems extremely hard to retain into adulthood.
There is an easy currency in the curmudgeonly tradition of dismissing anything new, a default superiority given to wry scepticism over youthful enthusiasm and intrigue. In other words, technologists have to work damn hard to get ideas accepted by the mainstream and there's a tediously charted route through uninterest and scepticism, the ridicule and hype of early adopting, the undulation of that scrutiny and eventual, often reluctant, acceptance. And then before you know it, everybody has a mobile phone!
This is not to be confused with the vital scrutiny of new technologies and their place in our lives; one such example is the personal privacy implication of the Memoto lapel camera, which automatically takes nearly 3,000 pictures throughout the day. And then there are the Guardian's revelations that the US National Security Agency has systemised access to swaths of our online activity – nothing less than a devastating crisis of trust for the consumer web and deserving of a separate analysis. That crisis also illustrates how vital it is that we understand the risks of the technologies we rely on daily, rather than absolving ourselves of responsibility for our online lives to others who allegedly know better.
Often under-considered in our attitude to new technologies is that the human side of engaging and improving that technology is half the point. Technologists present us with the tool and we help work out what it can do; the shopfront for mobile apps was built by the technologists, but their success was down to hundreds of thousands of developers and designers who had ingenious ideas about useful or entertaining things to build. Google Glass, another of a swath of wearable technologies slowly drifting into the public consciousness, is an exciting, challenging case in point.
There is no app store for the life-augmenting tech of Google Glass yet, but its success depends on it. So what can our open-minded imaginations – to recall that sensation of limitlessness and exploration – conjure up? A speaker by our ear, a camera for stills and video, voice commands and a small, basic screen in our peripheral vision. Forget that you'll feel silly wearing them (because you felt silly and unsure when you first used your pager/mobile/Skype) and think of the opportunity. It could be great for sport, with live radio coverage playing into your ear and statistics displayed. Or maybe for travel, where the headset will translate everything you see and hear instantly. Boom! Another industry disrupted. All in a day's work for Google.
Rethinking the mini-computer that is our smartphone makes sense. Our mobile lozenge is a legacy format that started with the candlestick telephone, a format determined by the size of the technology and the dimensions of the human body. We deserve better! We are comfortable with a watch format because we know it and Samsung's Galaxy Gear or the Apple iWatch combine that format with the success of wearable fitness devices, like FitBit. But add new sensors, as well as imaginative software, into these mini-computers and the impact could be significant. Non-invasive blood testing will soon be a reality, transformative for diabetics who will no longer have to puncture themselves several times a day, as well as those who have to monitor cholesterol.
To scratch the surface of what's possible: health apps will be able to monitor those blood test results, and sync with the restaurant as the wearer walks in, to suggest the most suitable low-GI or low-cholesterol meal. The behavioural implications could be profound, but we need to be interested in understanding and exploring the potential so that we are ready for the debate about who has access to this data, and whether it could ever be shared with a health insurance provider.
Picasso reportedly said computers were useless because they could give only answers. It's a beautiful idea that without human inspiration, without knowing the questions we need to solve, we can't create anything really powerful. But he also told his lover and fellow artist Françoise Gilot he saw painting "as a form of magic, designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us". Perhaps that's the best way to see technology, and with the limitless possibilities of an open mind.
Breaking the mold
Free with every purchase of Sugru is the wonder of what you ever did without it. It looks like play-dough, but dries as a flexible, silicon rubber. The real delight is the playful, hack-it-better mentality of users, who have created glow-in-the-dark tent pegs, a kettle for the visually impaired and camera housing on a helium balloon that took photographs of the Earth from 100,000ft. Its appeal is the ethos of modifying and personalising mass produced products, and in repairing rather than throwing them away.
The magic of old tech
Technology of an even older kind at the Proms recently, where I was mesmerised by Janine Jansen of the Orchestre de Paris leading Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto. Whatever the technological secrets behind that Stradivarius sound – wood infused with potassium borate, or an unidentified music – it was the elemental technology of a 286-year-old violin and the manipulation of horsehair, gut and precious metal that created all that magic. With more than a touch of artistic genius, too.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Corruption watch: Here comes Citizens United 2.0
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Green on the outside, red on the inside? A watermelon tells you what's wrong with the climate debate
Watermelon is a word that tells you what is wrong with the climate change debate.
For some libertarians, it is the insult that expresses what greenies and climate scientists are really up to. Behind all the acronyms and the jargon, they say, is a conspiracy to promote a nakedly political aim – anti-big business; anti-free market; pro-tax increases. In short, green on the outside but red on the inside.
The full conspiracy theory requires an impressive degree of paranoia, but one of the reasons the jibe is so persistent is that, if we're honest, there is a grain of truth to it – at least among some in the green movement and on the left.
Many of the policy responses to the climate change problem – consume less, regulate businesses, curb big oil and coal, restrict car use – feel more comfortable to those on the left than the right of the political spectrum. And as a result, right-leaning politicians and thinkers are in danger of losing grip on the most important issue of our age. That has already happened in large measure in America. It would be disastrous if it happened in the UK too.
This is the backdrop to the parliamentary science and technology select committee's inquiry into the communication of climate science, to which I gave evidence on Monday. The Met Office is being questioned on Wednesday. The MPs on the committee are trying to get to the bottom of why the public is still confused about climate science when the core science has been pretty clear for years. The thrust of many of their questions was "what could the media be doing better to communicate the science?"
Here's my answer in a nutshell:
• Don't confer scientific expertise on people who do not deserve it.
• Avoid false balance. In a field where 97% of peer-reviewed publications support the mainstream position we don't serve the readers well by giving undue prominence to those on the fringes (think scientists who argue HIV does not cause Aids or that smoking has no link to cancer).
• And perhaps most importantly, make clear where scientific uncertainty lies and where it does not. While the precise impacts and timescale of climate change may be uncertain, the basic tenets are well-established science. The projections from climate scientists indicate that there is a significant risk of profound changes to climate if we continue to release greenhouse gases at the current rate.
But if it was just a question of putting across complex science to a lay readership whose attention must be grabbed from the numerous other shiny news stories on offer that would be, if not easy, at least no harder than your average science story. Science journalists' stock in trade is making unfamiliar ideas intelligible, compelling, relevant and entertaining. And let's face it, climate science may be complex, but the Higgs boson is harder to grasp than global warming.
The elephant in the room at the parliamentary inquiry though has been that, consciously or not, there are people on all sides of the climate debate who argue backwards from a cultural or political position. As a result, arguments about the science of climate change become a proxy for what is really a political argument. If you like the prescription, then you embrace the diagnosis. If you don't, you undermine the diagnosis or attack the doctor.
Here's an example of former chancellor Nigel Lawson doing just that:
"There is now a new religion – the AGW [anthropogenic global warming] religion, of which scientists are the new priesthood, preaching their dogma with precisely the same claim to authority as the medieval catholic church."
It is perhaps understandable that some on the right have reacted strongly to what they perceive as a left-wing agenda masquerading as science. But it is also a catastrophic mistake.
Mark Henderson, in his book The Geek Manifesto, argues:
"The result has been to create a powerful constituency that delightedly seizes on any indication, however poorly founded, that the science of climate change might be less robust. If the problem can be discredited, then so can the solutions."
The irony is that the radical green camp and the libertarian camp are not so far apart.
Environmentalist Mark Lynas (quoted in the Geek Manifesto), argues:
"The rightwing climate contrarians and the greens actually agree that climate change means we have to dismantle industrial civilisation. The greens want this, the right wing doesn't. It leads them both to manipulate the science."
The truth is that we don't need to return to the Stone Age, but all this has made it much harder to have a sensible discussion about policies to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. We need a vigorous – and yes political - argument about nuclear power; carbon capture and storage; climate diplomacy; windfarms, air travel and much more. Not to mention how much it will all cost. But that has been twisted by those who prefer to park their tanks on the lawn of climate science.
The reality is that atmospheric physics does not care which party you vote for. So politicians of all stripes need to come up with a coherent response to the profound societal questions raised by climate change. Hiding behind bogus uncertainty about the science as an excuse for inaction is not an option.
So I repeat the plea I made to the select committee for centre right politicians, thinkers and cultural figures to reclaim the climate change issue and talk about it in language their supporters will understand and warm to. With admirable exceptions (here's one interesting recent initiative) there is a big void here to fill.
Only then can some of the political poison be drawn from the debate and the watermelon jibe finally be laid to rest. That would be good for both left and right.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
["Cute Little Girl Eating Watermelon On The Grass In Summertime" on Shutterstock]
Hugh Jackman explains how coffee and a technology that burns manure can help change the world
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Dear NRA: Are you really going to tell me that 'guns don't kill children; children kill children'?
The cover of the recent Children's Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:
The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.
That's just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report's 73 following pages are devoted to restating it. Sometimes, this done to illustrate the chilling frequency of such deaths:
• One child or teen died every 3 hours and 15 minutes• Seven children and teens died every day, more than 20 every three days• Fifty-one children and teens died every week
Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:
Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.
And then, there's the shameful comparison to other countries:
US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined.
Put it slightly differently:
US children and teens made up 43% of all children and teens in these 26 countries but were 93% of all children and teens killed by guns.
The report is an exercise in word problem reformatting, a hideous nightmare of a standardized test in which every answer is both "all of the above" and wrong. We have failed. The numbers in the examples change, but the fact they illustrate is big and ugly and refuses cosmetic adjustment: the United States, despite a meekly gratifying downward trend, continues to kill its young people with guns at rate more in line with war-torn nations than the prosperous, peaceful countries we presume to lead. In a different, but equally upsetting report, the World Health Organization observed (pdf):
With the notable exception of the United States, most countries with youth homicide rates above 10 per 100,000 are either developing countries or countries caught up in the turmoil of social and economic change.
The repetitiveness of the statistics reflects desperation, I think. One can picture the authors' frantic oneupmanship in coming up with ways to make the truth as vivid as possible: compare it to war! Compare it to Sandy Hook! And, of course, show us the victims – not via pictures of the violence itself, thank God, but in descriptions of who they were: post-Sandy Hook stories salt the wound:
Steven Curtis, 12, dead after accidentally shooting himself in the head with his father's gun. Caroline Sparks, 2, shot in the chest and killed by her five-year-old brother. Tayloni Mazyck, 11, caught in gang crossfire and paralyzed for life. The list goes unrelentingly on. (As of July, the New York Daily News found 120 children had been killed by gunfire since Sandy Hook; they relied only on news reports, not CDC surveys. The end number will be undoubtedly, horrifyingly larger.)
The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can't reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public's willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association.
The whimpering death of the Toomey-Manchin bill has been examined at length; the CDF notes further that, beyond the Senate voting against regulations, a majority of Americans were for (assault weapons ban, background checks):
Several proposals to weaken existing gun violence prevention measures received more 'Yes' votes than the background checks provision. They included a concealed-carry reciprocity proposal and a provision to prevent veterans who are mentally incapacitated from losing their right to own a gun without a court hearing.
The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms and weakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting "stand your ground" laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.
Colorado reigned in some gun rights after the Aurora massacre in July 2012; today, it is at the center of an NRA-sponsored recall, to be decided this week. Another state legislature, Missouri, both liberalized conceal carry and took unprecedented step of nullifying all federal gun laws – outlawing the federal government from enforcing its gun restrictions within the state. The bill was passed and then vetoed. This week, the legislature will meet in a special session to override the veto.
The Missouri proposal goes beyond the kind of passive quasi-civil disobedience of, say, medical marijuana laws, or even those rebellious legislatures that have sought to nullify Obamacare. The Missouri law would punish federal enforcement of legally enacted statutes by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from co-operating with federal efforts.
This is insanity.
Conservatives and liberals alike can use the tragedy of children's deaths as evidence of the need for their favored policies. After all, gun rights advocates want more guns in schools, they argue, for the greater safety of the children. They might even deny the relevance of concealed-carry laws and stand-your-ground provisions to the issue at hand. What does banning raids from the federal government's "jackbooted thugs" (in NRA president Wayne LaPierre's famous formulation) have to do with those classrooms full of dead kids?
There is only a shuddering half-step between between the general availability of firearms, their lax regulation, and the death of children. States with background checks have 16% lower gun fatality rates. Child access prevention laws reduce accidental shootings by as much as 23%. Australia passed a strict assault weapons ban and mandatory buy-back program (the US law once on the books had no such program) in 1996 – and hasn't had a single mass shooting since.
I'm not even sure the CDF believed this report would change that many minds: to anyone disinclined to believe that strict gun laws work, the report is just a recitation of bad things happening because of bad guys (even if a lot of those "bad guys" are other children). Perhaps the point of the report was more modest: just to let people know what is happening, what violence is going on beneath surface, as politicians and lobbyists posture. Though, who knows: Missouri has the fourth most gun deaths in the nation, the sixth most deaths by firearm for children under 18 and is a favorite transit point for gun-traffickers (in a July raid that may be deemed illegal next week, federal agents seized 267 illegal weapons) and look what's happening there.
We're beyond the point of "what will it take" when it comes to sane gun laws. The tragedies that should spur protests and marches and petitions happen quietly every day.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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