Steven D over at Booman Tribune alerted me, Unarmed Black Man Shot By Cops, Again. It is about Jarame C Reid who was killed during a traffic stop in Bridgeton, NJ — in which he was just the passenger. It happened back on 30 December, but it is getting attention how because the police dashboard camera video was just released. And it shows that Reid was shot while he was apparently unarmed with his hands raised over his head.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched the video. I’m not going to watch the video. Things like that are extremely upsetting regardless of the circumstances. But according to all the reporting, the video is clear. Steven D added, “You can hear anxiety, anger and fear in the voices of the police…” And I figure that’s what happened here. Police, like all people, get themselves worked up. Emotionally, they are on a hair trigger and unfortunately, they have guns. This is not to apologize for the officers, but I can well see how such a thing could happen without the officers being psychopaths.

What bothers me in all this is that the shooting was not really a story for three weeks. There were witnesses who said that Reid was shot while unarmed and with his hands up. But that didn’t much matter — especially after Michael Brown, and what was a farce of a grand jury and the resulting media narrative that claimed that such eyewitnesses were lying, when they were contradicted only by the officer and one clearly deranged racist who almost certainly wasn’t there. So I can understand why the media is reluctant to report on yet another case where the police kill an unarmed black man who had his hands raised.

Is this where we are as a society? Can the police kill any black man with a crowd of ten thousand witnesses, and have it be no story? That is: it is no story unless there is video footage of the incident? That certainly seems to be the case. Certainly, Eric Garner’s death would have been nothing at all if it hadn’t been for the video. And even with the video, there was no indictment. And I seriously doubt there will be an indictment in Reid’s case. Because it can’t be the officers’ fault because it is never the officers’ fault because they were afraid and their jobs are so dangerous. Also: a police officer’s word is always golden because they would never lie — not even when it is very much in their interests to do so.

We have a really bad situation in this country. And it is bizarre. The same people who are convinced that they must hold onto their guns or Obama will send the black helicopters after them, believe that local law enforcement officers are above the law. But even apart from these freaks, white America needs to wake up. This may be primarily a problem in minority communities where it seems that the police are constantly in fear of their lives. But that kind of thing grows. Nothing I’ve seen indicates that the police will stop being pussies. With every police shooting, all we hear is about what heroes most officers are and how dangerous their jobs are and how we should just be happy they don’t go door to door killing the first born son of every family.

So I understand how it happens that police officers allow situations to escalate, become fearful, and then use deadly force. But I don’t think that makes it acceptable. It’s like how abusing children can make them violent adults. I understand, but that doesn’t excuse it. I still think murderers should be punished. As a society, we can’t continue to excuse misbehavior and incompetence on the part of our police. The stakes are too high.

The consistently brilliant Jonathan Bernstein was answering questions yesterday. And one of them really caught my eye, So What If Majority Parties Lose? In the article, he claimed, for example, that the Republicans holding the House in 2012 despite losing the popular vote was more due to a Democrat being in the White House than any built in advantage for the Republicans. He also claimed that it is most democratic to not allow small majorities to do whatever they want (as can happen in a parliamentary system). I have problems with both claims, even if I don’t fully disagree.

Let’s start with the idea that there is no built in advantage for Republicans — a claim that Bernstein seemed to imply, but in fairness, never said. In the article, Bernstein noted that the Democrats did very well in 2006. That’s true, but so what? In the House that year, Democrats won 15% more seats than the Republicans did. But they also won 20% more of the popular vote. Compare that to 2012 when the Democrats got 14% less of the seats, even though they won 2% more of the vote. Or 2010: Republicans got 25% more seats but won the popular vote by 15%. Or 2014: Republicans got 31% more seats but won the popular vote by less than 13%. That seems like an extremely troubling systemic bias. And this is the House of Representatives! The Senate is far less democratic — by design. But it is clear that we have problems that go beyond the design of our system and the fact that liberal voters live in high density areas.

This brings up something that really bugs me. It is the idea that there is a “natural gerrymandering” because liberals live in high density places like cities and states that aren’t backwaters. I don’t have a huge problem with the Senate. It is, as I mentioned, designed that way. Similarly, there is a smaller effect in low population states in the House. But there is nothing natural about putting making districts strictly urban or rural. The only thing that is natural is that it is to the advantage of various political actors to do that. These same political actors have no problem creating the most unnatural districts when that suits them.

Bernstein’s main point in the article is one that I’m not totally against. It goes back to Karl Rove’s idea that if you got 50% plus one vote, that gave you the ability to do anything you want. Of course, it doesn’t. It is more true when Republicans are in the majority because, in general, Democrats are spineless pussies. But in some ways, it is good that our system is set up to make change proceed slowly.

But there is another aspect of this that I think is quite poisonous. Because political parties never get to do what they really want to do, the voters never get to see clearly what they are voting for. For example, as much as the Republicans may whine, Obamacare is still a fairly conservative plan. So the people never got the opportunity to see a truly liberal idea: Medicare for all. Similarly, the economic policy these last six years has been more conservative than the policies we saw of any Republican going back to Hoover. I don’t mean tax policy here. I mean government spending. So we’ve had a very slow recovery. But that isn’t the fault of liberal policy.

The question is whether allowing voters to see what their actual votes mean would make up for the absolutely disastrous policy that the Republicans would push when they did get into power. And I have to admit: I don’t know. But it does bug me that the American voter still depends almost entirely on the vagaries of the economy to determine who to vote for. It all seems quite random. And in this way, Bernstein was right when he noted, “In other words, it’s a problem if a party that takes 49.5 percent of the vote gets to run the government, but it’s almost as big a problem if a party that wins 50.5 percent gets to run it.” But maybe if people were able to see what their votes mean, we wouldn’t have a political party as crazy as the modern Republicans.

Tuesday night, in all there were four responses to the president’s State of the Union address (plus a repeat of the regular one in Spanish). It’s pretty amazing when you consider that the address itself was pretty much always just a letter until Woodrow Wilson. But it speaks to just how screwed up the Republican Party is that they can’t manage to have just a single speech they can unify around. It is an outgrowth of the revolutionary nature of the conservative movement. It also speaks to the narcissism of some of their stars: most notably Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

You may have heard that Cruz accidentally released an unedited version of his talk where he is shown stopping and starting over. It is actually kind of impressive — especially if you compare it to the over-rehearsed creep show that was the official response by Jodi Ernst. Cruz manages to make his points very well without ums and uhs, on the fly. I would be surprised if 5% of the federal level politicians were capable of this feat. When it comes to this kind of stuff, there is no doubt that Cruz is a major talent.

But Cruz is also a freak. The speech that he did release is filled with the usual conservative nonsense. And it sums up exactly what conservative pundits have been complaining about since then. His big complaint is that Obama didn’t show up repentant. Republicans are really good about claiming that the last election means the American people totally support them when they won that election, and ignoring it if they haven’t. Well, as I wrote over and over after they lost in 2012: there was no reason for any given Republican politician to “moderate.” They were still in office. They didn’t lose. And the idea of a “mandate” is generally silly regardless.

In 2010, after the Republicans had a really successful election, Obama was a fool to act as though the election meant anything at all for him. The only thing that had changed was the composition of the electorate. Almost no one had changed their minds. And regardless, Obama was elected for four years — not two. If the Republicans acted as arrogant in 2009 after the landslide of the 2008 election, how dare Cruz suggest that the president should come before Congress with his hat in his hand? But I understand: it’s all politics. Cruz knows this, of course; but he also knows that he’s talking to people who hate Obama and would hate him no matter what they did.

A good example of this was Cruz’s complaint about Obama on terrorism. This is what he said:

More generally, the conservative press has been all abuzz with the idea that Obama did not specifically mention al-Qaeda. There are always specific words that conservatives complain about the president not mentioning. It isn’t that he doesn’t talk about concepts. He mentioned “terrorist” once, “terrorism” once, and “terrorists” six times. But that isn’t good enough. He had to mention “al-Qaeda” — or according to Ted Cruz, “radical Islamic terrorism.” I wonder if “radical Islamic terrorist” would have been acceptable. This also goes along with the freak-out during the 2012 election that Obama had said “acts of terror” rather than “terrorism” after the Benghazi attack.

But this isn’t just affectation. This really gets to the heart of the revolutionary nature of the Republican Party. For outsiders, there is nothing that really separates the thinking of Jodi Ernst, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Curt Clawson, who gave the “official” Tea Party response. But inside the conservative movement, there are big disagreements. This is real Russian Revolution nonsense where the exact words that one uses indicates purity to the true (in this case) conservative movement. It is a joke. Unfortunately, it isn’t a funny one like Monty Python brought us.

Will brought my attention to this tragic story, Nine-Month-Old Boy Accidentally Shot by Brother in Elmo, Missouri. That got me doing a little research and I started thinking about the way that we make a big deal out of rare events but don’t pay any attention to common things that are much more likely to kills us.

You may remember a few days ago, I wrote, We Fear Ebola — It Is From a Scary Country. My point in that article was that our fear of Ebola was all about our fear of the manner of death rather than death itself. Ebola, which has been responsible for exactly one death in America, was a big deal, but influenza, which has killed dozens of children just this season, is not. In that case, I think it has a lot to do with notions of purity: influenza is our disease and Ebola is theirs.

Similarly, the nation freaked out when 12 people were murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. But even at the time, I had silently compared it to something I care a lot about: a bit more than twice that many pedestrians are killed in traffic accidents each day. I’m not equating these things except in the sense that they both represent unnatural ways to die. It is true that there will always be accidents (although there are many things we could do to make pedestrians safer). But what about accidental gun deaths?

According to research compiled by Smart Gun Laws, from 2005 through 2010, there were 3,800 people in the United States who died as a result of accidental shootings. That’s 633 per year, or a bit less than two per day. So statistically, more people were accidentally killed with guns during the week of the Paris massacre than were killed by the massacre itself. What’s more, we know, “People of all age groups are significantly more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries when they live in states with more guns, relative to states with fewer guns.” And certainly, while having one gun in the house might make you safer, having 30 certainly doesn’t — and that’s even true if you believe the black helicopters are coming for you. (I would assume you would want a few guns and lots of ammo.)

The reason I think that American gun owners don’t worry about this is partly due to purity. But the bigger issue is the sense of control. Even if guns might make people less safe, they feel safer with guns because they feel as though they control the situation. This is similar to how people can be afraid of flying in an airplane but not driving in a far less safe car. But I do think it is a delusion. Whenever I talk to gun enthusiasts about gun accidents, they tell me about gun safety classes and all the rules that they follow to keep safe. The problem is that I’m sure all the people involved in those accidents said the same thing before those accidents.

What’s more, I have never been around a gun enthusiast for any length of time without seeing occasional lapses of gun safety rules. They don’t even seem to be aware of it unless I point it out. And when I do point it out, it is usually shrugged off as an unimportant thing. And they are right. None of the rules are important until they are.

I’m not suggesting that people ought to freak out about gun safety or pedestrian safety or anything. I think we all freak out a good deal too much. But it doesn’t help to have delusions of control. I have lots of tips to help pedestrians avoid injury or death — but walking near traffic is still dangerous. There are many things that gun owners can do to minimize risks — but owning a gun is still dangerous, and I think the vast majority of people would be safest without guns. The biggest problem is the delusion that we need to worry about Muslim zealots attacking us at work. And an even bigger delusion among many of us is that we could do anything about it anyway.