Obama in the Wild
by KTKOctober 2nd, 2008
Through a bizarre sequence of random surfing I found myself on the Website of Field & Stream Magazine, which is running an interview with Barack Obama. Quite an interesting read, actually - he does an excellent job laying out and explaining his conservation policy, and handles the flap over his remark about “clinging to religion and guns” pretty effectively, I think.
What impresses me most, as always with Obama, is his deep and easy familiarity with policy detail, and to a slightly lesser degree his ability to translate that to the values and interests that center in people’s lives. Really, any serious aspirant to the presidential level - there are two on the Democratic ticket this year, and at most one, though even that’s looking shaky, on the Republican one - should be expected to be conversant with the issues of the day. But some are better than others, and I think Obama rivals the Clintons in sheer competence on policy matters. Never mind whether you actually like the policies, he at least knows what he’s talking about; he calmly takes questions on almost any issue and invariably produces detailed and nuanced responses that demonstrate that he’s not thinking about that thing for the first time, or simply faking his way through.
Look at his response to a slightly hostile question in the interview above, on gasohol: in a few sentences he details the relationship between two competing land-use policies, explains how fuel ethanol fits into long-term energy policy, rattles off half a dozen alternate sources of ethanol and touches on their financial implications and relative energy density, and then addresses how ethanol affects the economics of food production and water-use policy - with references to the relevant federal legislation. This is all off the cuff, unprepared. Other questions touched on national parks and the outdoors (he recounts personal visits to several different places, with specific references to distinct aspects of them he liked), oil drilling (he discusses long-term energy policy and the relative yield of different potential oil reserves, naming places he would and would not support drilling and giving specific reasons why), and whether he would have “sportsmen” in his White House (he answers with an analysis of the importance of having an outdoors enthusiast, as opposed to an energy executive, as Secretary of the Department of the Interior for its functions and its relationship to other Cabinet departments). And he very forthrightly addresses a whole series of questions on the 2nd Amendment and gun control, discussing them effectively and in detail even while pushing for more regulation than the gun nuts would like. He knows his shit. And outdoors issues are not even one of the things Obama is particularly noted for - these are the issues he is weak on!
Especially coming in the middle of the Palin fiasco, and the gross insult to the nation that she represents, it’s so refreshing to hear from someone who knows his stuff, discusses it intelligently and in detail, and isn’t afraid to treat the public as also being intelligent enough to engage in such a discussion with him. The novelty of competence is so overwhelming that it is startling. And Obama brings it to the campaign so effortlessly. As his running mate once said, somewhat (I hope) less gracefully, “That’s storybook, man!”
I’ve never been totally sold on Obama as a “new kind of politician”. But something is different about him, that’s for sure. And it’s long overdue.
Categories: Culture, Energy, Environment, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics |
if “he knows his shit” when it comes to gun laws, why does he seem to think the AWB is “common sense” anything? why does he seem to think it covered AK-47’s? okay, he’d have to really know this shit to know just how and why it didn’t, but why does he think the semiauto AK-clones the AWB covered are mostly used to hurt people when that’s blatantly false?
now, knowing a fully-auto AK from a semi-auto one would be too much to ask of anyone who’s not a gun nut. but i don’t think it’s too much to ask that he look at the crime statistics before discussing a bill that supposedly regulated supposedly dangerous weapons because, as he himself says outright, they were supposedly used mostly for criminal purposes. he’s a legislator, so he can be expected to look into what effects a law he likes has on society, and to evaluate the law critically in light of them. he doesn’t seem to have, though.
him thinking that there’s a “gun show loophole” can be chalked up to this not being his strong area, he’d have to be a gun geek and/or a firearms law wonk to know just how and why that buzzphrase is misleading. but then he shouldn’t go and blatantly state this “loophole” has been a problem. people might ask him how it’s been a problem, where, when, for whom, and why he says he thinks it’s been a problem. being ignorant about the laws concerning private person sales of firearms is no crime, but when you go to state there is a problem in there somehow, you’re professing knowledge which means you’d better have some. but if he did, he wouldn’t use such a misleading buzzphrase!
NN:
Almost all your response is to the substance of Obama’s positions on guns. Those are important questions, but in this post I was merely addressing the fact that he knows and understands the issues - not whether the positions he takes are the best ones.
You are characterizing any case of disagreement with your beliefs as evidence of lack of knowledge, which is absurd. It’s obvious Obama knows what the various issues you raise are about; the fact that he approaches them differently from you is not ignorance, he has just arrived at different conclusions after thinking about the issues, mostly, it seems, because he has different priorities. You persist in describing any difference in values as a lack of factual knowledge - the two are completely different.
(1) Whether the AWB is “common sense” is obviously a matter of opinion. Equally knowledgeable people can take opposite positions on that question for reasons that have nothing to do with lacking information.
(2) I suspect Obama thinks the AWB covers AK-47s because of “the semiauto AK-clones the AWB covered” (as you so rightly put it). And whether or not he “know[s] a fully-auto AK from a semi-auto one” (as you again put it), the latter do fall under the AWB. Your own words demonstrate not only that your implicit claim about Obama (that he believes something about the AWB that is factually incorrect) is wrong, but that your disagreement with him - over whether there should be such a ban - is again a matter of values, not of factual knowledge. And if you are trying to make the argument that Obama is wrong in referring to the “AK-47″, because the (legal) semi-automatic clone of that weapon is not a “real” AK-47, well, that’s a very lame and nit-picky argument, and it doesn’t track with the usage of the actual gun owners and sellers who trade in those weapons, who universally refer to them just as “AK-47s” (look at any gun shop Website).
(3) As to the “gun show loophole”, you are merely parotting the ridiculously false right-wing talking point about that issue. Of course there is such a loophole, and closing it makes sense. (For those not up on this particular evasion, it works like this: gun sales through professional gun dealers are subject to background checks and waiting-period requirements for the buyers; sales of privately-owned weapons between non-professional individuals are not, partly because there’s no way for private individuals to conduct background checks, and because the case of small-volume sales between single individuals are not really the biggest problem in unregulated gun availability. At gun shows, however, this means that private sellers can set up alongside professional dealers in large numbers; the professional dealers must follow the buyer-qualification regulations, but the private dealers do not have to. At such a show, someone who is prohibited from buying weapons legally, because of mental illness or a felony record, can choose from potentially hundreds of weapons offered by private sellers who are not subject to any buyer-control regulations. This means that prohibited buyers have almost as much latitude to buy guns at a gun show as do legal buyers, while they would have no such opportunities buying in the ordinary private-sale market between single individuals. It’s obviously a “loophole” - if not in the regulations, then in the functional opportunity for criminals to buy guns illegally. It could be easily obviated by providing a mandatory background-check service at gun shows, but the gun nuts have done everything they can to make sure that illegal sales in large volumes remain possible at those shows.) Obama thinks there is a loophole because there is; whether or not you think it’s an important problem, your disagreement with him is again not a matter of factual knowledge (or if it is, the knowledge deficit is on your side, in denying the obvious fact that criminals can buy a wider variety of guns, in larger numbers, at gun shows than by private transactions, and the background-check regulations which prevent that in professional gun shops do not prevent it in temporary, large-volume, multi-dealer, for-profit gun shows - which is exactly what the “gun show loophole” is).
you say that as if there were something wrong with addressing another person’s substantial arguments. have the repubs really driven the tenor of American political discourse to such a depth?
and yeah, i “parrot” the “talking point” about gun shows because this is one time the right wing gun nuts get something correct. if there were truly some great problem with private citizens selling their privately (and lawfully) owned property to other private citizens, i should think you ought to be able to show some evidence for this. you do not. instead, with a bit of digging i could find you FBI studies showing gun shows are not a significant source of weaponry for criminals, who instead get most of their guns from the very kind of private transactions you pooh-pooh. hence, the “gun show loophole” is a red herring, and your blather of “illegal sales in large volumes” is so much bushwa. show me the large volume of evidence such illegal sales logically ought to leave behind, why don’t you?
here’s the real deal: folks push this “gun show loophole” nonsense for the simple reason that they want to shut down gun shows in order to make it ever harder for private citizens to buy and sell firearms, one little bit at a time. whether they really figure in crime is irrelevant; the goal of gun control is not and never was to curb crime, it was and is to get rid of guns as an end in itself.
NN:
Tsk, tsk. You’re off message on the gun show loophole. It’s not that they want to shut down gun shows; it’s that they want to prohibit private-party sales of firearms. Get your talking points right.
More seriously, though, I think the whole hubbub about the gun show loophole hurts gun enthusiasts a lot more than it helps them. Closing up the loophole (or, if you don’t like the term “loophole” in this case, altering the law) to require background checks for ALL sales at gun shows, with the service provided by the show organizer, as KTK suggests, would do pretty much nothing to inhibit the ability of a private seller to sell guns legally at a gun show. It would barely qualify as a minor inconvenience. And if the gun nuts are right, and it’s rare to unheard-of for illegal buyers to get their guns at gun shows in this way, then you lose nothing by agreeing to the change.
Would doing so dramatically (or even measurably) reduce gun crime? Almost certainly not. But your staunch opposition to such a modest change makes you look like an unreasonable extremist to the 70 or 80% of Americans who don’t have strong feelings on the issue one way or the other. You can cry “slippery slope” all you want, but that’s not going to resonate with anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.