Year: 2010

Yesterday was “Fix the Sewers” day in the news media.  A front-page New York Times story presented the sad story of many municipalities and water districts with need of making major repairs to sewer and water lines first laid more than a century ago.  The problem is that the municipalities and water districts need to raise taxes to pay for the repairs but every time revenue-raising is mentioned, some politician or another, standing up for the people, just says “no.”  The rally cry of virtually all of the citizens that the writer, Charles Duhhig, chose to quote in the article is the same: we already pay enough for our water and sewer service.

As reported in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post–Gazette, Pittsburgh provides a comic example of the contortions governments are going through to scrape together funds to keep clean water flowing in and waste water flowing out.  The Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority has been taking a lot of heat for putting a $5 per month opt-out program on their customers’ bills to cover a warranty program that pays for (extremely rare) repairs to the water line that are the owner’s responsibility.

It’s the opt-out that has people hopping mad, because the water company is collecting the money for a private company and it takes two phone calls to opt out of the warranty program.  Yesterday’s article discusses some of the reasons the water company might have agreed to this kind of deal, so unfair to customers.  Of course, politics and cronyism are involved. 

But it turns out that in return for the help the water authority is giving it in marketing its warranty business, the private company has agreed to use some of the money it gets for warranties to fund efforts to get storm water out of sanitary sewers, thus reducing sewer overflows.  Bizarre!  Do you think water authority executives figured that they would get less slack imposing an opt-out program for a private company than raising rates or taxes?

I think the theme song for the current era should be that old blues-rock number by Ellen McIlwaine, “Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”   Everyone wants government services, but no one wants to pay for them.  And no one wants to pay for anyone else’s, even if others paid for theirs or their kids’, or would pay for them if they were in a similar predicament. 

No money for roads, for sewers, for bridges, for schools, for connections to technology.  Plenty of money for iPods and iPhones and flatscreen TVs and electronic games.

Instead of engaging in exercises of nihilistic demagoguery tricked out as traditional values, elected officials and those running for office have a responsibility to plan for our country’s future.  When tax and rate increases are necessary to meet infrastructural needs—and by the way create jobs— it’s not the time to score points or get greedy.  It’s time to come up with a plan and raise taxes.  If politicians and mainstream media came out in favor of the tax increases we need, as they might have done before the Age of Reagan descended, through repetition of the message they would eventually educate citizens of the need for revenues.  Of course, the more we spend on fixing our infrastructure, the less there would be for military follies.

The weekend brought the news that conservatives had injected pro-Republican, pro-Christian values into the social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools, in many cases rewriting or retouching history.  The right-wingers were also able to block every attempt others made to interject more about Hispanics into the study of Texas and U.S. history and culture. 

So what’s more obnoxious?:

To require that the study of the Constitution includes a special focus on the 2nd amendment.

OR

To ask students to question if the founding fathers really wanted to separate church and state (despite the fact that so many of their families originally came to the New World seeking religious freedom).

OR

To refuse to mention that there were some Tejanos dying along side all the white males who sacrificed their lives at the Alamo for the freedom of Texas.

Of course, my vote for most obnoxious change might be for the amending of the expectation that a student can “explain why a free enterprise system of economics developed in the new nation” with the following, “including minimal government intrusion and taxation, and property rights.”   I don’t think most legitimate historians would see it that way.

The most amazing part of the story is that not one person on the Texas Board of Education is either an educator or a historian or other scholar.  For those who want some details on the Conservative educational putsch in Texas, turn to The New York Times or the Associated Press.

After thinking about it, I’m as amused as I am concerned about these changes.  For one thing, I think the fear is overblown that text book publishers will make wholesale changes that will affect (and infect) the children of other states.  As the Times article points out immediately after playing the publisher fear card, in a digital age the impact won’t  necessarily be felt elsewhere since publishers can now use digital technology to customize text books to different states.

It’s regrettable that the children of one of our largest states will get an inaccurate view of history and be unprepared for the cultural diversity that is rapidly becoming the defining mark of our country as whites slip into minority status. 

But children’s history books have always presented a distorted view of the country.

Here are some of the myths that were passed off as gospel truth when I went to public school:

• The U.S. is a special nation (“exceptionalism”) with a manifest destiny to stretch between oceans.
• The U.S. only intervenes in the affairs of other nations for altruistic reasons.
• Atomic power (and by implication the atom bomb) is our friend.
• The Russians want to overrun the United States. 
• The old South was a pretty nice place.
• Robert E. Lee was a great general and against slave owning but reluctantly loyal to his state.

(This last myth always pissed me off, even in middle school, because as a young chess player it seemed obvious to me—and previously to George Washington and Mikhail Kutuzov, among others—that if you have the smaller army on your own territory that you play hide-and-go-seek and stretch out the supply lines of the enemy.  Instead, Lee attacked.  Years later I read the wonderful Lee Considered, in which Alan Nolan shows that Lee the slaveholder was not antislavery, that he endorsed Southern independence and that he lost the war by his repeated offensive thrusts.)

Every generation puts its own the spin on the myths it tries to sell its children.  I object to the inaccuracies that conservatives have foisted on the Texas curriculum, but the fact that every school text book of every generation has similar ideological underpinnings makes it less bothersome.  I also wonder if the next Texas Board of Education will undo a lot of the damage in a few short years.

Historical revisionism is everywhere, all the time.  I remember laughing out loud the first time I went to the History Museum in Pittsburgh and saw an exhibit of the bloody Homestead strike in which all sides acted heroically and there was no bad guy (or bloodshed for that matter).  Of course, sponsorship money for the museum came from large corporations, which certainly would not want a pro-union story told, even if that’s what the facts supported.

The real problem is the very fact that publishers toady to the ever-changing political views of school boards instead of always presenting the consensus of the experts in the field.

My own belief is that that truth will set you free.  We should not only give children facts that are as untainted as possible, we should also train them to always seek truth and provide them with the intellectual tools to do so.  I think children should be taught at an early age to understand the difference between science (and in science, I count history and the other social sciences) and religion, between “this is what I know” and “this is what I believe.”  Science is about “how,” religion is about “why.”  There is room for both when educating children, as long as we don’t try to pass a belief off as a fact nor teach about one set of beliefs at the expense of all the others. 

Everywhere across the country, groups are aggressively asserting their rights to carry arms and trying to overturn or roll back existing gun laws.  Is it a coordinated movement generously funded by special interests?  Or is it a sudden upwelling of collective fear that a Democratic or African-American president may somehow impose stricter gun control? 

Who knows?

But it sure seems as if a small but very well-funded group of people want to turn American streets into Dodge City shooting galleries.  And wherever they go, the right-wing media applauds them and our so-called mainstream media gives them extensive coverage, which merely serves to make their voices seem more plentiful than they really are.

Here are some examples of recent aggressive pro-gun activity, with one article per example:

• A group has been actively carrying unconcealed weapons into Starbucks, which has said it won’t ban guns in its cafes. Article
• As I mentioned in my blog entry of February 24, Students for Concealed Carry on campus has held protests at various colleges and universities which ban guns on campus.  One example 
• This group is now planning a series of protests in early April. Article
• Some one with deep-pockets backing is challenging the Washington, D.C. law that forbids carrying firearms in public.  Article
• The Supreme Court is considering another lawsuit that would overturn the ban on carrying guns in Chicago. Article
• A proposed law would overturn the Virginia law that allows people to buy no more than one gun a month!  That’s 60 guns every five years, and supporters of the law don’t think that small arsenal is enough for law-abiding citizens! Article
• In the current Arizona legislative session, state lawmakers have proposed more than a dozen bills to expand rights to carry and use guns and knives.  The proposed laws would allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit, end requirements that guns manufactured and kept in Arizona be registered, and allow university professors to carry guns on school grounds. Article

To tell you the truth, I’m getting scared to walk around in public, and I’m definitely not stepping foot into Starbucks until it changes its policy and bans guns in the stores. 

I see so many situations everywhere I go in which people get momentarily angry or are arguing in public.  Road rage.  Disputes over parking spaces.  Cutting ahead of someone in a checkout line.  Looking at some young fellow’s girlfriend with a little too friendly of a smile.  A dispute over a restaurant bill.  Admonishing a thin-skinned employee.  Welshing on a bet.  Overcharging for something in a store.  A cultural difference is misunderstood as threatening or racist.  Any one of these common occurrences could flare into bloody violence if people routinely carried guns in public.  This admittedly emotional reaction is, sadly, backed up by the facts, which in most years show that more people are killed by “friendly fire” than by criminals shooting guns.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is one of the best places to go to find out the facts that dispute all of the claims of pro-gun advocates.  The most poignant numbers are featured on the webpage that introduces the many pages of facts and figures on the Brady Campaign website: 354 people killed by guns on average a year in Austria, Australia, England & Wales, Spain, Canada and Germany combined.  In the United States, it’s 10,177, almost 29 times as many!

The Brady Campaign has started a campaign to influence Starbucks to ban guns in their cafes.  The website has a sample letter and a place to sign a petition.  I recommend to my readers that with or without the help of the Brady Campaign that everyone contact Starbucks and tell it you want it to ban guns in its cafes and that you won’t be buying anything in any Starbucks until it announces a ban.

This past weekend, a Forbes special list of America’s wealthiest counties dated March 5 made the rounds of Internet news and personal finance websites.  The article immediately makes clear that by counties they mean suburban counties.

When you click to find out more, you are given the opportunity to look at other Forbes lists, all delivered in that irritating Internet slide show format, so you have to click through 25 pages to learn the top 25. 

The list at the top of the list of lists was America’s 25 most miserable cities.

The wealthiest counties.  Not the wealthiest metro areas.  The most miserable cities.  Not the most miserable counties or suburbs.  The juxtaposition of these two surveys just about says it all about Forbes’ view of what constitutes the good life: Gated suburbs in artificial environments near malls and chain restaurants and away from anything nonstandard or representing diversity. 

Forbes at least seems to be aware, with not the least embarrassment, that all those rich suburbs they love are exploiting the economic vitality of one or more urban centers.  Here is a quote from the first page of the wealthiest suburbs list slide show: “Money may be earned in the hearts of big cities, but it’s brought home to the nearby suburbs. Forbes ranked the 25 richest counties based on median household incomes for 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The counties that do best are driven by growth industries like technology, health care and government. It also seems to help if you’re on the East Coast–19 counties on the list are in the Northeast or Southeast.”  In fact six of the counties are suburbs of New York and nine of our nation’s capital.  By the way, New York itself rates as 16th most miserable city.  Frankly, I would be exhilarated to live in New York, but quite miserable in Morris, Somerset or Hunterdon, New Jersey, all among the 10 wealthiest counties.

Now what makes a city miserable?  In reading what Forbes says on the first page of the slide show on miserable cities, note that all the criteria could apply to many suburban counties as well.  For example, I’m fairly certain that there are more Superfund sites in suburban and rural areas than in city centers.  And as long as a commute might be if one lives within a city, it must by definition be longer in the wealthiest suburbs which are typically the more distant one.

But of course, only cities are being rated on their miseries, and here’s how: “Our Misery Measure takes into account unemployment, taxes (both sales and income), commute times, violent crime and how its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years. We also factored in two indexes put together by Portland, Ore., researcher Bert Sperling that gauge weather and Superfund pollution sites. Lastly we considered corruption based on convictions of public officials in each area as tracked by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.”  

How its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years? New York gets downgraded because the Knicks stink?

But the point of the exercise is not to measure misery with any exactness, but to demean urban life by associating it with some negative attributes such as crime, long commutes and pollution.  And the point of the wealthiest counties survey is to make sure that the most positive attribute in the 21st century United States—wealth—is associated with counties (and not cities).

I don’t have time today to go into why Forbes so consistently hates cities, except to say that hating cities and the diversity and modernity they symbolize has been part of right-wing ideology for decades.  Forbes buys into this right-wing ideology, although it sees as its core tenets not values, but laissez faire capitalism, you know, the kind that makes it all right to manipulate real estate markets.  

Over the past few months we’ve been reading about protests against steep tuition hikes for state universities by students, teachers and other citizens of the sovereign state of California, home of sunshine, freeways and the world’s sixth largest economy.  In another part of the world, many Pennsylvania drivers are up in arms that the state wants to make I-80 a toll road to help pay for keeping state roads in repair and mass transit improvements.

Today brings more of the same in two strangely similar news reports: One that Arizonans are furious that the state highway department closed all the freeway rest stops.  The second reports of the fear and concern of people and law enforcement groups in California, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon and elsewhere that state prisons are releasing prisoners to cut costs.

What did people expect when governments keeps taxes lower than they should be?  You wonder why tuition is going up, prisoners are getting out early and rest stops are shuttering their WC.  You wonder why so many of your roads and bridges are in disrepair.  You wonder why so many public schools can’t afford new books and computers for their kids.

You can’t provide the service if you don’t have the money.

“Starving the beast” is what many right-wingers call it.  Since the passage of California Proposition 13 in 1978 and the ascent of Reagan in 1981, politicians and legislatures have put local, state and federal revenues on a starvation diet that has led to an erosion of basic services.  The frequent cutting of taxes, particularly for the well-to-do, has emptied the coffers everywhere at the moment when we need public spending more than ever.  Besides helping the victims of the recession ward off starvation and homelessness, we also face the challenge of rebuilding our sewer, road, school and other public infrastructure and we’re in debt.  And yet many politicians and much of the populace call for cutting taxes even more.

Besides not taxing us enough, government has made two grievous errors:

• On the federal level, burning trillions of dollars and counting on two senseless and unwinnable wars. 
• On both the state and federal levels, letting special interests dictate how industrial policy is implemented.  For example, in the Bush administration, the lion’s share of money for alternative energy technologies went to corn biomass conversion, which uses more energy than it creates.  We’ve seen how the gun manufacturers’ lobby has enticed legislators to erode the safety of Americans everywhere.  It seems as if behind every law is a company or industry that campaigned for its passage and will benefit from the way the law is written.

Contrast the United States with Western Europe, which has much steeper taxes than we do, but provides a full range of social services to its citizens — health care, education, retirement all at a high level of quality.  The freeway roads are in fine shape, at least in the five western European countries in which I’ve traveled over the past few years (Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg).  Everywhere you can see the digital revolution has improved the basic infrastructure.  Mass transit within and between cities is uniformly inexpensive, convenient and safe.

Of course if we raised taxes and thereby had the money to fix our infrastructure, invest in better public schools, develop more mass transit and finance health care reform, some people would say we’ve become socialists.  And they might call us commies if we kept our noses and our troops firmly planted outside the internal affairs of other countries.

And who would want that?

I’ve now had a chance to see a lot of the coverage of the study of marriage and cohabitation among men and women ages 15 to 44 that was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).  Yesterday I analyzed the coverage in the New York Times, which was schizophrenic in that most of the article went about disproving what the article reported in the headline and first two paragraphs as the study’s most important finding.  That finding was that people who cohabit are 6% less likely to be together 10 years after marriage than people who don’t live together before getting hitched.  The Times article buried the real significance of the study, that more than 61% of all women now cohabit with someone else sometime in their lives.

It turns out that most of the rest of the news media focused coverage of the NCHS study on either proving or refuting the assertion that cohabitants are less lucky in marriage later on in life.  Here is a representative sampling of the coverage spins:

• ABC-TV nationally ran with the Times version and may even have broken the story with the misleading, almost fallacious focus that the Times used.
• KGO-TV, the San Francisco ABC affiliate, also ran with the ABC-Times version.  
• Reuters tried to show that marriages last longer than cohabitations, a bizarre twist that reduced the article to a shabby bait-and-switch:  Reuters said that 78% of marriages lasted at least five years, whereas only 30% of cohabitations did, and then immediately pointed out that the main reason that cohabitations ended so soon is because slightly more than half of all cohabitating couples marry within three years of shacking up. 
• USA Today went with the herd on focusing on the question, do more cohabitants divorce?, but at least it got the facts straight, reporting that couples who live together before marriage and those who don’t both have about the same chances of a successful union.  
• Top News took the USA Today line.  
• NBC-TV offered yet another angle for the most newsworthy finding of the study: “Two-thirds of first marriages last at least a decade, which was a goal found to be more likely when the couple had children.  Childless marriages were more than twice as likely to end before the 10 year mark.” 

(Sidetrack: Some media said it was a NCHS survey, while others identified the organization of which NCHS is a part, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  CDC is better known.)

In other words, the news media for the most part entirely ignored the fact that the survey showed that more than 61% of all U.S. women now live with someone in a sexual relationship without the benefit of marriage for some period in their life, twice as many as a mere 15 years ago.

In other words, living together is now the norm.  It may not be what the Christian right or the mainstream media arbiters of taste want to hear or want us to know, but there it is.

It’s too bad that most people depend on the mainstream news media or the rightwing fringe media for most of their information.  Think about all the young women and men made to feel bad by pious bigots of their acquaintance or exhorters against “living in sin” on one of the several Christian TV and radio networks.  If those kids only had access to the NCHS survey they’d realize that everyone’s doing it, which means it’s probably not that bad.

A story on page A14 of today’s New York Times appears to be at war with itself.  Or perhaps the editor and writer are at war over what’s really important in the story.  As this almost ludicrous tale unwinds, I think we’ll see an ideological prejudice fail at twisting a report into something it’s not—that is, for those readers who venture beyond the first three paragraphs of the article.

The story, by Sam Roberts, concerns a study of men and women ages 15 to 44 that was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) using 2002 data. NCHS is part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The headline and the first paragraph serve as a warning to youthful damsels and gentlemen everywhere that cohabitation does not lead to marriage:

Study Finds Cohabiting Doesn’t Make a Union Last

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

In 13 of the remaining 14 paragraphs, Roberts quotes experts who disprove the point of the lead or cites other statistics from the study that are far more interesting than the fact that 6% more people divorce within a decade of marriage if they lived together before the blessed ceremony.

Roberts first uses two experts to deftly dismantle the premise of the lead.  Michigan professor Pamela Smock points out that 6% is not that much.  Then Cornell professor Kelly Musick digs deeper into the statistics to figure out what the body of facts in the survey is really telling us: “The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women.”

There are so many interesting facts that Roberts tells us, including what to this former journalist was the real headline and lead: “that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.”

Now the fact that cohabitation is now the norm and that it’s happened over the course of a mere 15 years: that to me is sizzling hot news.  The fact that a mere 6% more of former cohabitants get divorced than those who waited until marriage to live together seems trivial in a world in which one-third of all marriages break up by the tenth year, also an amazing fact.  For more amazing facts, read the story or go to the study.

The obvious question: why are the headline and lead of this story—the only well-read parts—so at odds with the rest of the article?  It’s as if someone imposed the misleading headline on both the story and the facts.

We know it’s not NCHS or CDC.  The study does not give any special significance or lead role to the 6% statistic anywhere in its abstract, executive summary or introduction.  Moreover, neither the NCHS nor the CDC has yet issued a news release on the study (in which this statistic could have served as a lead or headline).  Check out the news archives if you don’t believe me.  It seems strange not to issue a news release, but I’m guessing that the federal government in this age of faith does not want to appear to be undermining marriage by stating that cohabitation is the norm.

We’ll never know, but I’m guessing that Roberts’ editor/editors and perhaps the headline writer, too, forced the misleading opening on the writer.  And he/she/they did it for ideological reasons: to lead with the fact that promoted the advantages of waiting until marriage to live with your beloved, even if that advantage is minimal. 

Most people only read the headline and first few paragraphs of news stories, so a good part of the literate world will get the wrong idea of what this survey says.  They may never get to the earth-shaking news that cohabitation is now the new normal, which is to say that many more people try it than don’t sometime in their lives.

It was such a tactic by a writer or editor that 20 years ago created the completely false myth that women who don’t marry by 30 probably won’t.  Behind both these manipulations stands the idea that marriage is the preferred state for all, all the time.  It’s clear that the people disagree.

We’re witnessing a perfect example of how unsubstantiated myths gain credence among the news media, the general public and, unfortunately, our leaders as well.

I think you know the kind of myth I’m talking about, but here are some examples of concepts that the news media, elected officials and other leaders promoted as factually correct that turned out to be all wrong, and in many cases were clearly known to be wrong by at least some of the people in the forefront of spreading the untruth:

• Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
• Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
• An attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin justified escalation of a bloody war in Southeast Asia.
• Capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime.
• Women who don’t marry by the time they turn 30 probably never will.
• Abstinence training leads to fewer teen pregnancies.

How do these myths take hold? 

Usually, it’s with the complicity of the news media, and that’s what we’re seeing with the small campaign by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to tout the absurd idea that the some or all the nations of the European Community (EU) will walk away from its single currency, the euro.

On February 11, I analyzed the Times story by Nicholas Kulish which stated that many Germans want out of the euro.  Most of the story was factual, but the assertions about the euro were sheer speculation. 

In the Thursday, February 25, 2010, Stephen Fidler of the Wall Street Journal grabs the baton from Kulish in a story that analyzes Spain’s economic problems.  The headline is “The Euro’s Next Battleground: Spain” but it’s in the secondary headline that Fidler introduces his big lie:

“Greece set off the crisis rattling the euro zone.
Spain could determine whether the 16-nation currency stands or falls.”

But the story begins by ignoring the false premise, instead giving us a lot of very useful facts about the economic crisis in Spain.  It then proceeds to discuss why sharing a currency with other nations complicates some traditional means that national governments have used to fight past recessions.

Then out of the blue, after a no-brainer statement that buyers of Spanish bonds are demanding higher interest rates, we get the opinion of an expert: “’Spain is the real test case for the euro,’” says Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. ‘If Spain is in deep trouble, it will be difficult to hold the euro together…and my own view is that Spain is in deep trouble.’”Later, after discussing other options for Spain, Fidler returns to his expert, using indirect discourse: ”Mr. Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute is among the pessimists who doubt the government will take this course. He thinks Spain’s chronic inability to restart growth will lead it to contemplate a third option: splitting the euro zone asunder by withdrawing from the common currency.”The article finishes with another 30 or so paragraphs about the Spanish economic crisis, all fairly factual in nature.

 

 

Thus, Fidler sneaks assertions of one expert into a 2,000-word factual article about a different, but vaguely related topic.  It’s the very technique the Times reporter used, but in Fidler’s case at least he gets an expert to say the myth he wants to spread. 

One expert and one expert only.

And, of course, the expert is from the notoriously right-wing American Enterprise Institute, which has as its stated mission “to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism—limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate.”  The expert provides no facts, no studies, just his opinion.  The reporter provides nothing to substantiate the expert’s expertise.  

Fidler has tried to sneak the myth that the euro is dangerously close to failing into a factual article, just as Kulish tried to in his Times article on Germany’s attitude towards bailing out Greece earlier this month.  Someone is plying these journalists into being accomplices in spreading what at this point is almost a lie.  Who could it be?

Of course it would be very convenient for the U.S. economy if many people believed that the euro was going under.  It would forestall thoughts of replacing the dollar as the bedrock currency of the world economy.  It would likely send many investors running to the dollar for safety.  If the euro really went under, it would turn one of our principal economic competitors into a bunch of smaller, far weaker competitors, none with the power to challenge the U.S. that the EU has.  Yes, many people in the U.S. would love to see the euro break apart.  But it’s not going to happen.  It’s just wishful thinking, a jingoistic pipedream.

It will be interesting to see if this false notion of the failing euro takes root in the media and the public.  If it does, it will certainly lead to regrettable business and economic decisions.  Unfortunately, wishing does not make it so, and when you make business  or political decisions based on fallacious information, you usually fail.

The local Pittsburgh media has reported about a young lady at one of the branches of the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) recently registered a new campus organization, the CCAC branch of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

Yes, you heard it right. Students for Concealed Carry on Campus! It’s an organization that wants to allow college students to carry concealed hand guns on college campuses, with proper licensing of course. 

Currently CCAC and virtually all other colleges and universities ban firearms, and with good reason.  Traditional college students and those who live on campus for the most part are still completing the transition from childhood to adulthood.  They are on their own for the first time, and often ready to break free of their former lives or their parent’s beliefs.  Many are still learning how to read other people’s words and actions.   While many college kids are studious, most start drinking for the first time, and many practice the ancient art of binge-drinking.  Many do drugs. There is a high rate of adjustment problems, including depression.  There’s lots of sex and everyone’s horny, which sometimes can lead to jealousy or misunderstood motives.  While many college students show remarkably good common sense, some do very foolish things that they won’t be telling their own children about in future decades.

It seems irrational to want to bring firearms into this potent mix.  The only thing that can come of it are more innocent bodies bubbling blood through bullet holes.

Which brings us to the organization, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which I am going to shorten to Stu-Con for the purpose of writing this blog.  On the website, http://concealedcampus.org, Stu-Con describes itself thusly:

“Students for Concealed Carry on Campus is a national, non-partisan, grassroots organization comprising over 42,000 college students, professors, college employees, parents of college students, and concerned citizens who believe that holders of state-issued concealed handgun licenses should be allowed the same measure of personal protection on college campuses that they enjoy virtually everywhere else.”

While regaining a right that they think has been taken from them is the objective identified in this mission statement, in fact much of the organization’s language and virtually all of its imagery focuses on self defense, i.e., shooting at someone.  There is a kind of Bernard Goetz subtext to the arguments and photography (Several decades ago, Goetz rode the New York subway with a loaded gun waiting for the chance to shoot a would-be thief or mugger; he ended up bagging four.)

Some example of this shooting mentality in the subtext of Stu-Con’s con:

• Every image on the website except for photos of the board of directors shows a young person firing a gun and not at a target.
• I have been to the Stu-Con website several times and until the visit I made while writing this entry the home page showed a montage of six posters, in all of which a young person was shooting at a bad guy, either for real or in a symbolic way. For example, one had two condoms and a woman firing a gun, with the caption, “What will deter your rapist from coming back for more?”  The poster montage was missing while I was writing the blog entry.  When I returned to the Stu-Con site a few hours later, there was only one poster, with the headline, “Which campus would a mass murderer pick?” and an image of a girl shooting and the caption “Armed Staff and Students” facing the image of a gun with a standard red “forbidden” icon over it and the caption “No Legal Guns Allowed.”
• Multiple repetitions of the assumption (fallacious) that carrying firearms reduces the rate of crime. By the way, Stu-Con admits that crime rates tend to be lower on the average college campus.
• Many inflammatory statements such as “Recent high-profile shootings and armed abductions on college campuses clearly demonstrate that ‘gun free zones’ serve to disarm only those law-abiding citizens who might otherwise be able to protect themselves” and “It is often claimed that students could not possibly react with the speed and proficiency required to take down an active shooter.  Neglecting the fact that these citizens (age 21 and older in most cases) already carry elsewhere and are trusted with that ability, as well as the fact that citizens are not required to perfect their skill in self-defense before exercising the right to self-defense, we present documented incidents of successful student self-defense.”

An interesting note: On its media page, there are no links to articles, only to YouTube versions of television news stories.  I guess it the Stu-Conners don’t believe college students read at all anymore. 

My assistant Colette contacted Stu-Con and asked three questions that are fairly standard, ones that most nonprofit organizations should be able to answer immediately.   I am assuming Stu-Con is a nonprofit because its URL ends in “.org,” and it takes a pretty slimy organization to register as an “.org” when it’s not a nonprofit.

Our questions, all of which Stu-Con’s Kurt Mueller refused to answer:

• Are you a nonprofit organization?
• Can you supply a list of your largest donors?
• What percentage of your 42,000 reported members are college students?

At the very best, Stu-Con comprises well-intentioned if slightly benighted young people who like carrying guns around and may be slightly trigger-happy.  At its worst, it’s another money-making rightwing con like the Tea Party convention and much Tea Party activity (see the second half of Frank Rich’s January 16 column).