— Editorial Reader

Via The Daily Beast

Just one week after a Texas state senator filed legislation to allow concealed handguns on the state’s college campuses, a scuffle between two men at Lone Star College, 20 miles north of Houston, left three people injured and the two shooters in custody.

The incident, which occurred around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, sent the campus into lockdown and students into evacuation mode. A 22-year-old man identified as Carlton Berry has been charged in the shootings, according to a statement from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Berry was among those injured, the office said.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to those impacted by the terrible event at Lone Star College today,” read a statement issued by State Sen. Brian Birdwell, the man behind the proposed bill. “Though few facts or details have been confirmed as of late afternoon, the basis for filing the Campus Personal Protection Act remains the same. This legislation is about ensuring that law-abiding citizens are able to defend themselves. It’s about trusting citizens with their rights.”

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Via The Daily Beast

The Great Gun Debate shows American political discourse at its irrational worst, with both left and right promoting panic and hysteria that distracts attention from the nation’s truly menacing problems. Instead of addressing crushing deficits, economic stagnation, political gridlock, and the erosion of middle-class security, politicians and pundits obsess over gun violence—one of the few challenges where the United States has made dramatic progress in recent years.

How can the president and his supporters work themselves into a self-righteous lather over minor regulatory adjustments that have been tried before with no measurable impact on the rate of firearms crime?

And how can conservatives work themselves into a paranoid lather over minor regulatory adjustments that have been tried before with no significant impact on our constitutional right to keep and bear arms?

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Via The New Yorker

Sixty-two legislators sit on the House Armed Services Committee, the largest committee in Congress. Since January, 2011, when Republicans took control of the House, the committee has been chaired by Howard P. McKeon, who goes by Buck. He has never served in the military, but this month he begins his third decade representing California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District, the home of a naval weapons station, an Army fort, an Air Force base, and, for the Marines, a place to train for mountain warfare. McKeon believes that it’s his job to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts. On New Year’s Day, after a thirteenth-hour deal was sealed with spit in the Senate, McKeon issued a press statement lamenting that the compromise had failed to “shield a wartime military from further reductions.”

The debate about taxes is over, which is one of the few good things that can be said for it. The debate about spending, which has already proved narrow and grubby, is pending.

The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which raised the debt ceiling and created both the fiscal cliff and a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which was supposed to find a way to steer clear of it, required four hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars in cuts to military spending, spread over the next ten years. The cliff-fall mandates an additional defense-budget reduction of fifty-five billion dollars annually. None of these cuts have gone into effect. McKeon has been maneuvering to hold the line.

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Via The Daily Beast

After the defeat of Mitt Romney on November 7, alongside several Republican Senate candidates vying for seats they were once favored to win, Republicans began wringing their hands over the future of the party. The election showed that the GOP was losing the demographic battle. A party of rural whites was clearly in trouble unless it found a way to broaden its attractiveness to Latinos, who voted for Barack Obama two-to-one, and other growing ethnic groups. “Unless we do that we’re going to be a minority party,” warned Newt Gingrich.

Skeptics have wondered if the GOP was really capable of change. Newtown offers Republicans their first test.

Much of the post-election discussion focused on immigration, an issue of obvious import to Latinos. Yet Latinos are hardly single-issue voters who care only about immigration reform. Appealing to this constituency is going to require the GOP to do more than provide undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship. Republicans must show they support a variety of issues important to the Latino community.

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Via The Daily Beast

Imagine you live in Connecticut, not far where the Sandy Hook massacre took place. Or, say, Oak Creek, Wis., where a gunman shot and killed six at a Sikh temple in August. Or in Denver, near the Aurora movie theater, where 12 were shot in July.

Fed up, and maybe a little scared for your safety, you decide that something needs to be done. But what? You check out the nation’s most prominent gun-control group, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, hoping to find an organization to join or at least some simple steps you can take immediately to join the fight—a march to attend, a congressman to pressure, news of legislation coming up before key committees in your local state legislature. For each state, the website gives you a generic form to fill out to contact your state chapter, which may be several towns over, a button to donate money to the group, and a link to learn about local gun laws.

Compare this with the National Rifle Association, which for years has been reaching out aggressively to would-be supporters everywhere from college campuses to CPAC by culling conservative email lists and by catching people at the point of sale of a firearm. Indeed, if you are thinking about joining the NRA, it is probably because the group has already reached out to you.

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Via The Daily Beast

I found out early on Election Day that Mitt Romney wouldn’t become our next president. I called my father, and he answered sounding somber. He told me that, based on early polling numbers, he didn’t see a foreseeable way for Romney to pull it off. There’s a very specific tone of voice my father uses to deliver bad news, and I flashed back to 2008. Still, I must have been in denial, because I pointed out that Ohio and Florida hadn’t been called yet, and we all know that elections are decided in Ohio! My father just sighed and said, “Honey, I’m sorry.” I started to choke back tears.

There was no reason for me to have such an emotional reaction to Romney’s loss. It’s not like he’s a close friend. Looking back to last week, I think that I was mourning something else. For the last four years, writing on this website, I’ve been calling for the Republican Party to come to terms with reality and modernize. Last Tuesday, Mitt Romney lost—and he lost big. As Republicans, we lost again. I felt sad, exhausted, beaten down, and heartbroken. It was the first time that I considered that the Republican Party, which I love so much, might die.

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Via The NY Times

After an hour of debate voters don’t know much more about Elizabeth Warren’s heritage than they did before. They know something more about her legal clients and those of Sen. Scott Brown, but they certainly know a whole lot more about where these two candidates stand on the key issues facing this nation. And that clarity is a good thing.

Warren continued to berate Brown for voting against three of President Obama’s jobs bills — bills that Brown insisted would have “raised $450 billion in new taxes.”

She continued to criticize him, as she has done repeatedly, for siding with “millionaires and billionaires” and “big oil.”

He reminded her that ending oil subsidies would only increase the price of gas for motorists and oil for homeowners, and that the so-called Buffett Rule “would fund the government for one day.”

[Full article here]