On Signaling and Subtext in Married-People Texting

"En route to get Sean. The expensive pistol class is full, but I'm first in line if someone cancels. We got this Cub Scout thing. Hope you're resting!" 

"Don't forget to take food coloring to the meeting with you." 

"Thanks! :D"

Now let's look at that in detail, shall we?

"En route to get Sean." 

Translation:   Don't worry, I remembered that I'm supposed to pick up our son. (This time.) As long as I continue to remember it all the way home, I will probably get him before the babysitter closes, as far as you know.

"The expensive pistol class is full, but I'm first in line if someone cancels." 

Translation:   Remember yesterday, when I brought up an Ernest Langdon pistol class in October, and I really wanted to go, and I suggested that maybe I'd take your van and sleep in the back, and you asked why not just get a motel? And I allowed as how the class is a little expensive, and you got me to admit how expensive, and then you sort of grudgingly accepted it, but you were fully on board with the van-camping concept, even though I'd started to think maybe a motel was more reasonable?
Well, by the time I contacted the class host, they were waiting on someone to confirm the last spot, and he did. So now there's no slot for me, which means you don't have to worry about how expensive it is! It's a clear win. However, I'm the first one on the alternate list and it would be unusual if no one canceled in the next two months, so . . . it's probably still going to happen. I'm considering stopping by the plasma donation place on the way home to see what the fund-raising potential really is.

"We got this Cub Scout thing." 

Translation:   I'm on such a roll, I also remembered to cancel gym night and will take the little Wolf to his cub scout meeting. Have you ever wanted me more feverishly than you do right now?

"Hope you're resting!" 

Translation:  I'm also sensitive and caring, so I remember that you didn't feel good this morning. I just hope you feel better and you're getting some rest before your work obligation tonight. Seriously, I am maxing this husband thing out today.

"Don't forget to take food coloring to the meeting with you."

Translation:  That's all very impressive and all, honey, but we both know you completely forgot about this. You should probably thank whatever is out there that you have me to remind you.

"Thanks! :D"

Translation:  Shit. I did completely forget about that. It's not a great feeling, but I'm buoyed by the certain knowledge that in five minutes I won't remember feeling bad about not remembering food coloring. I'll just wonder why I have "SEAN FOOD COLORING" written on my hand.

Moms Demand Action Says They'll Win, Because You're Laughing at Them.

Moms Demand Action Hits Home (h/t to the Aurora Beacon News)

This was the answer Annie Craig of Aurora gave when I asked her why she had gone to Indianapolis recently to attend a gathering of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Why Indianapolis? Because that’s where the National Rifle Association was holding its annual meeting.

And why over a mile away, out of sight of the convention? Because being threatened or spit on is such valuable street cred for this bunch that they're willing to accept stories without evidence, but being photographed amid a sea of friendly, happy people who all think their tiny band are dead wrong would be bad "optics."

“We wanted to go calmly, quietly, and unarmed to protest their leadership and the extremism they are promoting,” said Craig.

Uh huh. It was very important for them to go unarmed, which was why they hired armed security to bear the arms (and the karmic wounds inflicted by carrying guns in Indianapolis.) I actually did see two "Moms Demand Action" folks downtown, I should admit. They were riding yellow bicycles with little "Moms Demand Action" signs. I should have gotten photos, but I didn't. There were actually as many Moms Demand Action ladies downtown as there were NRA-specialist panhandlers, so they've got that going for them.*

“I don’t come from a gun family,” she said, “so I don’t understand gun mentality. Which is not to say that those who want guns and qualify, shouldn’t have them. We just want what we call ‘gun sense’ in our laws.” This gun sense includes universal background checks. This helps keep guns out of the hands of people who are convicted felons or mentally ill. They also want a ban on assault weapons and online guns sales.

But of course they do. Except . . . didn't you just quote Mrs. Craig as saying that her position doesn't mean that "those who want guns and qualify, shouldn't have them."? So, should I have my Colt AR15--the one made in 1971--or shouldn't I? 

No one is asking law-abiding gun owners to give up their guns or hunters to stop hunting. In the words of Moms Demand founder Shannon Watts: “Our issue is not really with the members of the NRA, 74 percent of whom believe there should be background checks on every gun purchase. We’re not anti-gun. We support the Second Amendment. Many of our moms are gun owners.” They simply want a return to common sense.

Well, no one except the people who want to ban various types of hunting, from feral hogs to wolves to bear, of course. And no one wants law-abiding gun owners to give up their guns except Mark Kirk and Dick Durbin, both of whom Craig specifically cites as politicians with "gun sense," both of whom have called for and voted for bans on specific firearms that I own. Or Watts' Axis of Bloomberg allies at CSGV, which have spent the last couple of weeks defending New Jersey's policy of banning every firearm except "smart guns," enacted before anyone even knew what form the technology would take or what it would be capable of doing. And, of course, Mrs. Craig herself, who was quoted elsewhere in the same article calling for a ban on "assault weapons." Remember that Colt AR-15 SP1 from 1971 that mentioned above? Do you want to take it away or not? And why should I believe your next answer when your last dozen were self-contradictory?

Craig told me how the NRA ignored them at first, but is now responding with anger, including snarky comments on social media, ridicule at how “small” Moms Demand Action is and outright lies about them. Watts recently had to take down her Facebook page due to all the hate and harrassment directed both at her and her family. But Moms Demand Action is not going away.

Uh huh. Moms Demand Action is one of the latest in a long, proud line of anti-gun activists who defame millions of people daily, refuse to engage with anyone who responds appropriately with facts and reason, and then complains about "harassment" and "bullying." Moms Demand Action has learned from other members of the Axis of Bloomberg on this front; like the CSGV. Their social media strategy for the past few months has been to ban anyone who politely disagreed on their Facebook page (ask me how I know) and carefully cultivate the few idiots who can't resist making threatening, profane or inappropriate comments. These they share widely, and they get twice the bang for their buck because reasonable gun owners who would condemn those comments never get the chance, at least not on the CSGV Facebook wall. In effect, they're curating a collection of gun owners or supporters who will act like the "insurrectionists" they want to believe are running things, and they're willing to prune the majority to get that collection.

Welcome to the internet, ma'am. It's an information superhighway.

“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Craig, “and our message is taking hold. I’m proud of our national legislators. Both Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk have gun sense. I wish that were the case for all our local representatives.”

Oh, it's a marathon, not a sprint? Just gonna outlast all those fickle gun owners who are only in it for a couple of weeks of activist cred? Good luck with that. I've been active on this issue for 25 years--I was literally a child--while you just got paid to fly to Indianapolis and stand in a park a mile away from the people you claimed to be protesting. Good luck with your marathon.

Personally, I would like to see the NRA return to what they once were and promote responsible gun ownership and hunting rather than fighting common sense things like background checks. But the NRA leadership seems unlikely to return to that legacy. So I expect to see the Moms Demand Action group fight on. Check them out at www.momsdemandaction.org.

You'd like to see the biggest, best-known opponent of your favored policy go away and focus on something else? Well, gee, that does sound like a swell deal. Where do I sign up to have you and yours just fold the tents and go away? Is this that Reasonable Discourse ™ thing I keep hearing about? BTW, congrats to MDA for beating out the Muscular Dystrophy Association and countless MILF-themed adult entertainment operators to grab that choice URL.

Gandhi once said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” If this is true, then Moms Demand Action is well on its way to victory.

Right, sure, gotcha, but there's a catch: if this were true, then being the plucky underdog with no members would assure victory. If being ignored or laughed at were some kind of guarantee of success, the Ku Klux Klan and the Raelians should both be on their way to cultural dominance. Not everybody who's losing is just about to pull off an amazing upset; often you're losing because you're wrong, or because you're not as good at the game you're playing as the other guy is. Muhammad Ali suckered everybody in with the rope-a-dope, sure, but he could do that because he was that much better than almost anybody else. If your strategy is to let George Foreman hammer on you until he gets tired because it worked for Ali, there's bad news: it barely worked for Ali, and you probably aren't on his level. This is really just a restatement of the refrain we've been hearing for 15 years now, that "the gun nuts can't keep winning forever, they just have to start losing . . . we're due for a win!" Mathematicians can tell you there's no such thing as being due for a win. Now, if you want a heartwarming story of a small group of plucky outsiders who made a difference in the end after being ignored and then mocked, consider the scrappy underdogs at Illinois Carry or the Buckeye Firearms Association. Illinois Carry is celebrating its tenth year this summer, and I'll be carrying a pistol to the celebration. Even I didn't see that coming when we started.





*If you were there, maybe you saw these guys? Sitting, reading Bibles, with signs that said things like, "First they took my guns, then they took my home. Any help appreciated." I briefly wondered whether some grad student was writing a paper on generosity and social empathy at the NRAAM, but I'm pretty sure this was just artisanal panhandling, carefully crafted just for you and me.

A Canticle For Horwitz: Yes, the NRA Is a Civil Rights Organization

Sigh.
NRA Is No Civil Rights Organization

The short version: Josh Horwitz articulates the CSGV's official position on civil rights, in which you are guaranteed the right to an unspecified level of emotional comfort and feelings of safety, but you are not guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms, because the former is a real civil right and the latter is not.

At the recent National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis, talk of “freedom” and “liberty” was in the air. But does the organization really embrace the entire set of freedoms that we cherish as Americans?

That's actually a provocative, compelling question, for people actually interested in the organization's future. I heard a lot of discussion of the same basic idea from a lot of NRA members at the NRA Annual Meetings in Indianapolis, where this op-ed was published in the Indy Star. The thing about the NRA that Mr. Horwitz can't get is that no matter how convenient it would be for him if the NRA could be boiled down to "Wayne LaPierre, Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent keep each others' book deals afloat," that's never going to tell the whole story of an organization with millions of members. As trite as it sounds, I am the NRA. And yes, I embrace American freedom. Yes, that means I care about Amendments 1-10, and also the rest of the Constitution. And yet, I sense that we're about to disagree vehemently. Perhaps we should define our terms.

When NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre declared that Americans need to be armed to the teeth because of “knock-out gamers” and “vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all,” you would have thought the organization had reached new heights in the art of hyperbole.

Yup, Wayne gets pretty worked up sometimes. And frankly, I get a little weary of the wild enthusiasm followed by amnesia that accompanies fads like the "Knockout Game." The idea that there's an organized game sweeping the nation doesn't seem to have much evidence behind it, and the way everyone seemed to be freaking out about it and then promptly forgot gets annoying when you see it happen over and over. On the other hand, young people hanging out on the streets and occasionally instigating each other to run over and kick somebody's ass just to prove they can isn't a myth, it's just depressingly normal behavior that goes back thousands of years. But that's not your point, is it?

 However, the NRA’s most ridiculous assertion is that it is “America’s longest standing civil rights organization.”

Ah! Now we're getting somewhere. It offends you to have the NRA usurp the mantle that rightly belongs to . . . whom? The NAACP? They claim to be the oldest "grassroots" civil-rights organization on their website, but they weren't founded until 1909, shortly after the 1908 racist riot in Springfield, IL (not far from where I stand right now, actually.) The NRA dates from 1871. But I know that's not what you mean. You mean that even though the NRA was arming and training freedmen in the south before the NAACP was founded, the NAACP fought racism in legitimate ways and the NRA didn't. I suspect we will still disagree on that point when we're done here. I suppose we could consider abolitionists, women's suffrage groups, and some I'm forgetting, but we're talking about groups still asking for money today, and anyway I suspect you don't care about the history. Your interest here is in showing that the NRA's advocacy for a fundamental civil right is illegitimate.

The truth is that the NRA cares little for any civil right that might interfere with gun industry profits via unfettered access to firearms.

Can you think of one of those, or is this hypothetical? Seriously, is there a civil right that interferes with access to firearms? To my knowledge, agree or disagree (and a lot of gun owners disagree) the NRA does not stand for unlimited access to firearms; the official NRA position has long been that background checks should be as efficient and transparent to the consumer as possible, that they should not be used to create registries of gun owners for later confiscation efforts, and that laws intended to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill and children should be enforced consistently.

(I didn't use your term, "unfettered," because there's something about arguing that I'm the crazy one because I don't want to have shackles, chains or manacles, metaphorical or otherwise, involved in my practice of a constitutional right. I'm giving you a pass, more or less, because I don't think I can fairly assume that you know what "unfettered" means.)

The NRA’s absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is not motivated by principle. It’s motivated by economics — the less regulation, the more profit.

You're forgetting another profit motive for the NRA--memberships. If the NRA throws members like me (not to mention Webster's Dictionary) under the bus by accepting your definition of an "absolutist interpretation," we'll walk away. You're still not getting this. You still think you can just make Wayne LaPierre the Bloomberg of the NRA and knock him off; you're blind to the dance he's doing. You could certainly argue that members like me are wrong in our "absolutist" position, but you're pretending that millions of people don't hold that position--despite all evidence.

Are you a business owner who believes you have a right to regulate the carrying of weapons on your premises for the safety of your employees? The NRA doesn’t care. It will force you to allow guns on your property regardless. In 2007, the vice president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce called a Guns in the Workplace bill supported by the NRA “the biggest assault on private property rights and the employer-employee relationship that this [state] Legislature has ever heard.”

Are you a business owner who believes you have the right to bar Muslims and Sikhs and Hindus on your premises for the safety of your employees? The ACLU doesn't care. They will force you to allow dark-skinned people with unfamiliar religions on your property regardless, and they'll tell you to your face that your fear of dusky oriental terrorists doesn't trump an American citizen's right to have access to a public accommodation, such as a business that's open to the public. But what do they know about your right to be a bigot in your own business, right?

BTW, Mr. Horwitz, the Florida Chamber of Commerce was wrong in their hyperbole (you're against hyperbole, remember?) and so are you. The bill you're talking about passed into law, and it simply states that if an employee complies with an employer's no-firearms policy, the employee may disarm and store the firearm in her vehicle in the parking lot even if the employer owns the parking lot. Property rights are important, but imagine an employer who wouldn't let a Sikh employee bring his knife into the office. Now, imagine a Sikh who says, "Well, OK, it violates my way of life, but I like working here, so I guess I'll leave it in the glove compartment when I'm at work."
Finally, imagine that employer firing that man despite his effort to comply with their weird notions. That's not fair, and you and I both know that if we polled people about the actual plain text of that law, most would agree. You can prohibit me from carrying a firearm into your place of business, but it's a little much for you to demand that your employees be denied the right to have anything you dislike in their personal vehicles in the company parking lot, especially when the contraband is only there because they took it off and stored it safely for no other reason than to comply with your rules. By the way, here in Illinois, one of the most anti-gun places an American can visit without a passport, our newly-minted CCL law has a provision that gives "safe harbor" to CCL holders who secure their firearms in their vehicles before entering a posted/prohibited business. It doesn't appear to apply to employees, although time and case law will tell, but it definitely protects me if I need to go into a posted/prohibited business--and remember, there are businesses that are posted/prohibited by law, where the management has no choice in the matter. When it comes to my own employer (one of those mandated gun-free zones) I have to park down the street in someone else's lot and walk the rest of the way, because somehow that's safer than leaving a gun in a holster and not touching it all day long. Civil rights!

Are you an American whose loved one was shot and killed because the gun industry negligently armed someone who was dangerous? Tough luck. You have been permanently denied access to the courts by a 2005 law drafted by NRA lobbyists, which gives the gun industry unprecedented immunity from civil litigation.

Are you an American whose loved one was run over and killed because the car industry negligently armed someone who was dangerous? Tough luck, because that's not a thing in American law. You're not actually supposed to be able to recover damages from people who did nothing wrong just because you think they have more money than the person who actually did you damage, or because someone's got a political axe to grind with them. You can't get lawsuit money out of GM because they failed to predict that someone would get drunk and drive one of their giant missiles through your front picture window, and you can't get lawsuit money out of Remington because someone else used one of their guns to commit a crime. You certainly can sue Remington if they knowingly sold defective products that posed a danger and caused damage, just like anyone else. The only thing you could argue was "unprecedented" in this situation would be the massive political effort to put gun manufacturers out of business (but you'd still be wrong unless we ignore alcohol, tobacco, etc.) In other words, the closest thing to "unprecedented" is the fact that people saw the need to pass a law to state that civil law really does mean what it says.

As usual, the NRA attempted to scare its faithful in order to drum up additional gun sales. Its leadership claimed that support for background checks and laws to curb gun trafficking is eroding our rights, even as Indianapolis grapples with a per capita homicide rate that has reached a 30-year high. There’s a reason that criminals in Indiana rarely if ever have to go outside the state’s borders to acquire the weapons they use to kill with. How “free” are Indianapolis residents who feel trapped inside their homes at night as a result?

I hear you, bro. FUD is wrong; using fear to sell your point of view is just disrespectful of your audience and dishonest besides. Well, it is when the NRA does it, right? Basically, Mr. Horwitz, you made an assertion and then provided no evidence for it. There was nothing in that little essay that supported your assertion that the NRA is not a civil-rights organization. Given that you made that assertion about a venerable group that has kept 10% of the Bill of Rights alive and kicking despite massive political efforts to grind it down or explain it away, it was clear that you weren't going to be able to find the easy way, but you didn't even bother to try.