Visiting Column #21 -- Poll Weevils

I am not one of those people who complains about polls because "Well, they never call me!".  They do indeed call me, and even when it's not a campaign season I get called about polls for this or that topic, including yes, whom I would vote for if the election were held today.

The topic of polls struck me a bit today when I saw one on TV.  The topic was what are called "red flag laws", and they concern the broader topic of gun control.  Red flag laws are laws which would allow jurisdictions to decline to issue firearms permits, or even seize weapons from, people who had somewhere written or recorded themselves in some way to give the impression that they would pose a threat to another person and therefore should be denied their Second Amendment rights.

The poll was phrased ... well, they didn't say how it was phrased, so we have to assume the simplest, which is that respondents were simply asked "Do you favor red flag laws, which allow government authorities to deny firearms ownership permits to, or seize weapons from, people who have documented mental instability or have made specific threats to others?"

Or something like that, in fifth-grade English.

At any rate, the results were not unexpected.  About 57% of respondents to the poll were in favor of such laws, 22% were opposed, and 19% had no opinion.  What, I thought to myself, would I have answered, had I been polled on that question?

Needless to say, I couldn't answer.  Well, the "needless to say" part is because as you might have guessed if you've read the preceding 1,020 columns, I very much appreciate the fact that many things are not black and white.  Red flag laws are definitely not black and white.

Laws are not concepts; they are, well, laws.  They are black and white, in that they specifically state what you can and cannot do, the conditions that apply, and the penalty for violation.  You want to have a law, you can't waffle.

I am probably OK with the red flag concept, at least as a "concept."  We already have classes of people to whom it is illegal to sell firearms, so that is not new ground.  If we are putting red flags on people who make overt threats, or who display disturbed writings online to where the "reasonable man" test would lead you to not think their being armed is a good idea, well, I can handle that.

But here's the problem.  It's called "subjectivity", and I don't trust government at any level to execute it.

At what point, we must ask, does a red flag get thrown?  That's really the problem of subjectivity.  Somewhere between a Facetwit post that says "I'm gonna get you!" and one that says "I'm gonna kill you!", perhaps.  What actually constitutes sufficient threat?  Who decides what is sufficient evidence of mental instability?  Would you want to be entrusted with limning the distinction and setting the point at which there is enough evidence of a threat to take someone's Constitutional rights away?  I didn't think so.

I don't want that responsibility, and I don't think that you do, and I absolutely know I don't want that done by some faceless government bureaucrat.  At best, I would consider Congress laying down some pretty clear guidelines (don't hold your breath), and then letting some challenge get up to the Supreme Court to validate it with perhaps even more guidance, the kind that lets the wrongly flagged person appeal.

So sure, but if I believe all that, how am I supposed to answer the poll?  I'm only "for" red flag laws if the criteria are well-defined and laid out and administered properly; I'm "against" them otherwise.  I'm certainly not "undecided."  They give me one choice to make. Yuk.

And if that weren't enough ...

There's the whole 'nother shoe.  That is, let's suppose that someone is denied a permit, red-flagged by some nameless government bureaucrat for an Instaface post that was misinterpreted totally and didn't represent any kind of a threat in context. What is the appeal process for that? 

No, really -- ask yourself this:
- Who actually hears the appeal?
- What evidence is needed to show a rational state of mind?
- Is the presumption innocence or guilt?
- What process is needed in order to execute the reversal?
- Is there an appeal of the appeal (if, say, a total anti-gun judge hears the first one)?

As I said, I'm OK with the consideration of red flag laws.  But if the execution, the logistics, the actual legislation and the details are full of devils, well, there's no way a poll can accurately represent my view.

So, I guess, stop asking me if you don't want the full answer.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #20 -- The Colonel of Truth

It's been a while since I wrote up one of those self-deprecating pieces, and since these days it's probably good to laugh at ourselves, it's clearly time to do that one more time, as I have plenty of reason to be self-deprecating.  Plenty.

The year was probably 1992 or so, which I remember because of where I was working at the time.  I was a program manager running a support program for the Marine Corps, which involved doing various briefings around the major Marine installations in the world to explain what my program was about (it was actually a data library that other programs used to create logistics models, but that's not very important.)

My running around the world was principally to install that library on small systems and show how it was used, but occasionally I'd have to sit in someone's office and go over the program, in general terms, using 1992 technology which, in those happy days before laptops, PowerPoint and Windows, consisted of transparent "cells" that you would put on an overhead projector and project onto a white wall if there happened to be one, or a movie screen if you were lucky.

So in the course of arranging my visits, I reached out to the colonel in charge of logistics programs at Camp Pendleton, California (I was based in an office in Woodbridge, Virginia at the time), setting up a time to go out and see him.  The colonel was named Jack Holly, and he was one of those people that you encounter in your life whom people just gravitate toward and you want to do whatever he tells you.  Leadership just radiated from him, and you would be ready to go through a brick wall if he asked you -- and that was just on shaking hands with him the first time.

You can never explain that effect very easily, why you might react to someone that way without even knowing them.  I recall also having that reaction on being in a hall with President Reagan in 1987.  Whew.  When I met Jack, I immediately recalled that experience.

So I had met him once previously, at a trade show, probably, and had known then that I'd need to come out and see him.  At the time, and possibly now, there were three Marine Expeditionary Forces, called MEFs, and their respective headquarters were in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; Camp Pendleton, California; and the third on Okinawa.

Col. Holly and I agreed on a time to visit him in California, and I headed out for what I assumed was (among other visits on that trip) a briefing in his office.  I carried my briefcase out there to the base, and was ushered into his office for what I assumed would be a professional half-hour or hour discussion about the program.  He'd ask questions, I'd answer, we'd talk, and then see what he might need to know.

I am quite OK with one-on-one discussions like that.  On the other hand, standing in front of a group gives me major stage fright, which throughout my career I had to deal with, including on stage as a singer.  Since in my profession I had to talk to groups all the time, I made sure to design my speaking slides for me, not for the audience.  They'd see them, of course, but the content was designed to remind me what to say next, so I wouldn't be so scared.  Eventually I got to trust my preparation and stopped fearing failure, but I always prepared slides very carefully, even very late in my career.

That wouldn't have mattered here, though, it seemed.  I was in a chair in Col. Holly's office this particular morning, chatting about the program and how it fit into what he was doing.  I liked talking casually with people, and still do.  You can sense how they're reacting and adjust on the fly.  This was going very informatively and professionally, and we were about 20 minutes in when the colonel said "Well, they should be ready for you now" and stood up.

As an old actor, I'm well-schooled in the notion that "the show must go on", which means not only that, if you break your leg onstage you keep acting, but also that you don't break character.  In this case, I had no earthly idea what the colonel was talking about.  "They should be ready"?  Who, I thought?  Ready for what?  I just shut up and played along as if I knew what was going on.

We walked out of his office and across the hall, and entered a larger room.  This was a conference room that seated about 20 people -- and there were about that many there, most all of them marine officers and a few senior non-coms.  Clearly, they were waiting for little old me, although for what I didn't know.

But I figured it out really quickly -- apparently I was supposed to give a lecture to the assembled marines on what I was doing.  Yep, there was the obligatory overhead projector there.  After a brief moment for suitable panic, I reached into my briefcase and took out some transparencies I would normally use for a briefing, stacked them up on the shelf next to the projector in what I hoped was a rational sequence, and put the first one on the glass.

I can't say it went "well", but only because it was an information-sharing brief and there wasn't anything specifically to accomplish.  So "went well" wouldn't have any real meaning unless one could say it "went well" if I didn't pass out, which I didn't.  With the slides there to guide me, I was able to get through them and talk about the information on each one, ask for questions, answer those I could and deflect the others.  I truly believe none of them knew I'd been ambushed without knowing it.  An hour later, I sat down with Col. Holly for a few more minutes, thanked him for his time and left.

There was absolutely nothing in the correspondence setting up the meeting to suggest that I'd be doing any kind of public briefing to 20 marines, nothing other than an hour in the colonel's office.  And I know for a fact that he simply assumed that a formal briefing was what I would be doing, and arranged for all the staff to be there to hear it.  I just didn't get the memo.

All's well that ends well, I suppose.  I'm quite sure that no one who was in the room thought anything was wrong, just another contractor in a suit come out to brief them on some logistics program, no different from 50 other briefings they got except for the guy in the suit was a little shorter than the rest of them.  I know I went to the hotel bar that night and had a double just to calm my still-frayed nerves.  Stage fright is a cruel master.

I next saw Col. Holly a few years later.  We were attending a trade show in Honolulu and I saw he was there and asked him to have a drink between sessions to catch up, as we had corresponded a bit in the interim and remained acquainted.  He was retiring from the Marine Corps fairly soon and I wanted to find out what his plans were.  I figured whatever company he joined, he'd be president of it before long.

Of course, I did mention that visit to Camp Pendleton and the briefing room surprise.  He remembered the visit but apparently assumed that the group lecture was planned, as he recalled nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly not that there was any perception of a miscommunication.

Perhaps I can't properly describe what happens when you walk into a room full of uniformed marine officers sitting at a conference table, expecting you to speak to them, when until you entered the room you had no idea you were supposed to.  I was seriously scared.  You have nightmares about things like that.

I survived though.  Preparation is a good thing, like having a tire-inflator aerosol can in your car.  Or a manila folder full of transparencies.  It can keep you from coming off like a fool.

Still felt like one, though.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #19 -- The Not-So-Sudden Death of the New York Times

You might have seen the words, unless you blinked a few times during the period in which it was the front page top headline in the New York Times, formerly a newspaper of repute.

"Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism"

The story for which it was the caption was, of course, the speech given by President Trump this past weekend on the two mass shootings in Dayton, OH and El Paso, TX, each of which was committed by a person with inflamed and misdirected passions -- Dayton by a leftist Antifa supporter (though his specific motive is unclear at this writing), and El Paso by a racist white supremacist.

The president made about as apolitical a speech on the topic as one could possibly have expected from any president, passionately condemning the actions and their motivating impetus, specifically calling out "white supremacy, bigotry and racism" as needing to be defeated and eliminated.  Those are sentiments I think we can all get behind.

And it would seem that the speech was so suitable to the occasion that the president-hating Times swallowed hard but chose the headline that it did.  The four-and-a-half words accurately portrayed the sentiments of the president as presented to the viewing and listening audience from the White House.

I don't read the Times, so I can't say that I actually saw the headline or the front page when it was issued, but as it turns out, apparently, rational, accurate journalism cannot be tolerated by the intolerant left, particularly when it involves President Trump.

The Democrat candidates for president, sparked by their hero, a 29-year-old former bartender from New York, began to beat their Twitter drums loudly.  "Oh, dear", they drummed, "that headline is too pro-Trump and needs to be removed!"  And, to the surprise of no one, it was.

Now, there are a couple things here that have to be noted.  First, of course, is that the headline was quite accurate.  I heard the speech live, and immediately saw it as being fair, conciliatory, healing, and at the same time clearly condemning the racist dogma that appears to have incited one of the shootings.  The president said what he was supposed to say, that is, what everyone on the left would have complained if he had not said, and had he not said it fast enough for their taste.

There was not only nothing inaccurate about the Times saying that the president called for unity against racism, it was actually the logical headline for what was the principal message he wanted to offer the American people.  Had the left not desperately needed to have gotten their panties in a wad about everything President Trump says or does, because he is succeeding and they're not, the headline would have been perfectly fine.  But they do, at least as far as their panties.

The other thing, though, is far, far worse.

As we know, or should, it is a long-established fact of journalism, taught the first week of Journalism 101, that there is a news reporting part of a paper, and an editorial part of a paper, and they are separated.  The editorial part is found at the end of the first section of the print edition, and it is clearly marked "Editorial" so that we know that what is printed there, the opinions of the paper itself, as well as on the opposite page (the "op-ed" writers, who are not the paper's editors), are opinions and not facts, per se.

When I say that the news and editorial parts of a paper are "separated", I mean "walled off", as in nobody works on both sides.  That purity-by-insulation is done to protect the reporters of the news from accusations of bias in their reporting.  No one need protect the editorial writers; everyone has opinions.  They don't all have editorial pages to voice them, which is why there are blogs.

Why is that separation necessary?  Because if there is a sniff that the reporting of a story is slanted by influence from the editor, the paper's journalistic integrity is forever lost.  We can then no longer assume that what is reported as "fact" is actually what happened.  Once you get to that point, there is no reason having a newspaper.  All you have, reporters and editorialists alike, is slanted to where the reader can no longer trust what is printed.

This is where we are today with the Times.  The facts are plain and well-documented; a bunch of Democrats protested a headline in the reporting section of the paper, and the Times capitulated and changed it to something else.  That decision was made by the editor, meaning the editorial side of the paper, violating the sanctity of the separation of news and opinion.

There will be an edition of the New York Times tomorrow, and the day after.  But it will never be the same.  If we have ever had a shred of confidence in the veracity of the news reported by its team of intrepid reporters, not that I ever did, that confidence is blown to the moon.

If the editorial team can change one word of a news story, let alone the top headline on Page One, there is no longer a single word of any page of the paper that can be relied upon for being accurate and unbiased, a correct accounting of the event being chronicled.  We will always assume that the editors may have changed the content of a basic news story to suit a political narrative.

"Democracy dies in darkness", the equally untrustworthy Washington Post likes to trumpet when trying to defend its Lilliputian integrity.

Journalism dies in bias, I would counter. 

R.I.P., the New York Times, 2019.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton