The Ithaca Plan

I've known plenty of white junkies. Back in the '80s, they were ubiquitous in my East Village neighborhood. A good friend ended up in rehab and turned it around. A co-worker I hired died of gangrene from a dirty needle. I once walked to work past a woman with suit and briefcase on the nod on the front stoop of her fashionable village brownstone. So I don't pretend that heroin is a scourge of poor urban African-Americans. But most people have pretended that, and the media has, for lo these many years—the result being that throughout the 20th century, heroin was a law enforcement problem, not a social or public health one.

Come the millennium, and suddenly heroin is the drug of choice for soccer moms with bad backs whose prescriptions for oxycodone have run out. When heroin is a major problem in New Hampshire, you know we've turned some kind of corner. Indeed, the media is suddenly extremely excited about heroin; local and national news magazines have cover articles decrying heroin's move to the suburbs, or Wall Street, or the children of middle class families. Yet, for the most part, it is still treated as a law enforcement problem.

Enter the Ithaca Plan, now trending on social media. Ithaca's mayor, whose father was an addict, looked around Ithaca, which is certainly not immune to drug problems, and set up a task force, which produced a plan. Taking a page from programs in Europe and Canada, the plan places law enforcement as one of four pillars, the others being prevention, treatment, and harm reduction. The piece of the plan that's getting the most attention is the supervised injection facility, meant to eradicate overdoses by providing a safe place to shoot up, with medical staff in attendance. It's sort of like when I get antibiotics—I always have to sit around with nurses nearby for 40 minutes until they know I'm not going into anaphylaxis.

But of course it's more controversial than that, and it's currently illegal, and our local police force has vowed to arrest anyone found there. So it's safe to say that the kinks have to be worked out. Ithaca will need assistance from the state and federal governments to make this happen.

Meanwhile, it's very exciting to see something proposed that is radical and different, as opposed to the same old stuff that hasn't ever worked. Our district attorney, who for a while has said that heroin is the most important local issue not being talked about, is on the front page of the Huffington Post today explaining why she favors the plan, for which she was an integral contributor.

There's plenty of resistance; people are already predicting that junkies around the world will move to Ithaca to set up shop. But this seems to be a well-thought-out plan based on plenty of existing data, and I'm interested to see how far Ithaca gets toward a saner, safer means of handling the heroin epidemic.

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Untreated Mental Illness Plus Guns

After Aurora, a Colorado Springs reporter wrote, "James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 at an Aurora movie theater, was seeing a psychiatrist at the time of the July 20 attack. If he’d been in Colorado Springs, chances are he wouldn’t have gotten even that much help."

After an October incident in Colorado Springs where a guy with a rifle and gas cans opened fire on civilians in the street, the local gun-nut mag noted that someone with an open-carry gun plus gas cans might be worrisome and require some level of serious response even as they applauded the mayor of Colorado Springs for not budging on the open-carry law.

Now that same mayor says about the most recent mass killing in Colorado Springs, the second in a month, that "one of the things we don’t do very well is identify these people, sometimes with mental health problems, and prevent their access to weapons."

Well, yes. We don't identify them, we don't treat them, and we don't prevent their access to weapons.

Adam Lankford at the U of Alabama has done the most interesting recent work on mass killings. He used a definition of four or more kills, meaning that the recent Colorado Springs shootings wouldn't even appear on his radar. (The FBI uses three or more.) Nevertheless, he found that the US accounted for 31 percent of mass shootings, and that the only real predictive correlation with any meaning was our firearm ownership rate.

So many people, the mayor of Colorado Springs included, attribute these shootings to mental health issues that I thought I'd look at a comparison. So I chose a few countries at random across the spectrum of mental illness and looked at their gun ownership rates as well. Numbers are pulled from WHO and from Small Arms Survey. Note that Nigeria has plenty of mass shootings involving Boko Haram, and Mexico beats the US in murder by gun thanks to drug wars, but until two weeks ago in Paris, almost no one on this list offered much that would rise to the FBI's definition of an "active shooter situation." In the US, "70 percent of the incidents" occur in either a commercial or educational setting.

We have more people with serious mental illnesses than any other nation on my list—2.8 percent more than the next closest country, which is Lebanon. But we have a boatload more guns. It's a lethal combination.

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Second Verse, Same as the First

Well, it's "unanimous," or at least as "unanimous" as a behind-closed-doors deal can be: The new Speaker will be Carl Heastie, whom the Times calls "flawed," which appears to be their nice way of saying "the usual dirtbag." Not only is the Times article worth reading, but so is this lovely comment by a reader:

Sleekit, cowran, tim'rous Heastie,

O what a panic's in thy breastie,

Hanky panky in thy past,

Hope it's wee and not too vast,

Clean up your act and make it hasty.

From the Assemblyman's own biography on his website comes this accolade:

Assemblyman Heastie is second to none when it comes to his ability to evaluate numbers. This skill was honed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he earned a Bachelors of Science in applied Mathematics and Statistics, which he followed up with an MBA in Finance from the Bernard M. Baruch College (CUNY). Throughout his academic career, Assembly Member Heastie has shown an immense love and enthusiasm for math.

Thus the $21K-$50K in credit card debt, the $10K in campaign expenses that were not properly detailed, the $23.4K in travel per diems, not to mention the $10K non-contribution from the check cashing "industry." Dude's a math WHIZ.

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In the Proud Tradition of Tammany

A very incomplete list highlighting just the past few years:

2008: Eliot Spitzer

2009: Tony Seminerio

2010: Hiram Monseratte, Pedro Espada, Alan Hevesi, David Paterson

2011: Carl Kruger

2012: Naomi Rivera, Shirley Huntley (The Year of the Woman)

2013: Vito Lopez, Nelson Castro, Malcolm Smith, John Sampson

2014: Tom Libous

2015: Sheldon Silver

LATER: The Buffalo News has a more complete list.

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If You See Something, Say Something

Too many people are busily attributing bad behavior on the part of the police to "a few bad apples." But you know that if you have one rotten apple in a barrel of apples, eventually ethylene gas from the rotter will ruin all the perfectly fine apples in the barrel. It's time to snip the thin blue line and get decent cops to rat out lousy ones, in much the way that fraternities and members of the armed forces are now being asked to stop sexual assault via bystander intervention.

I get that it's a tough sell. The bro mentality is strong and resolute from childhood. It's reinforced on sports teams and in scouting programs. But it sucks, and eventually it will destroy the very institutions the bros are trying to protect. The danger may be greater from within than from the unknown terror outside.

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Might Actually Have to Read His Book

I don't know, but I still think this stuff's important.

Bureaucracies organically flow toward the easier result, and the easier result is always a smaller company, an undefended person, a low-level drug dealer. They hesitate before it decides to proceed against a well-heeled, well-defended company [against which] they’re going to have to fight for years and years and years just to get the case in court … It’s not just about the poor, it’s more about how there’s a class that enjoys impunity and then there’s everybody else.

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#YesAllWomen

The Twitter feed is difficult to read, riddled as it is with misery and fear and the occasional misogynistic blat of denial. But there’s no question that it’s touched a nerve, and resurrected in thousands of us memories we’d thought long dead and buried.

Like walking to school at 13, a long walk, because I had changed neighborhoods but not schools, and confessing to a friend that I couldn’t make the walk without having guys honk or whistle out their windows at me. So she told her brother, and his reaction was, “Why, when all she wears is that baggy dress?” which was a dress I’d made myself and loved, but really, as he rudely suggested, it was not revealing at all, so now I wondered, “What was I doing to make this happen?” The decades-older me knows it was “Being female and 13,” but the newly sprouted teen hadn’t a clue. So I started walking with my bookbag slung between me and the road, as if it were a shield.

And using a book as a shield lifelong whenever I dine out alone.

And riding a crowded subway to work, jammed like sardines, and wondering whether that was someone’s briefcase, but slowly registering, ew, it wasn’t, because there’s nothing like a little frottage to start the day right, and twisting imperceptibly so that it hit somewhere less vulnerable, and the guy in his Brooks Brothers suit or his low slung jeans staring straight ahead, never ever at me or anywhere near me, because again, it wasn’t about me. It had nothing to do with me, really.

Or sitting at a desk in a long Queens office with the bosses’ father at the desk directly behind me, quietly, whisperingly, asking me all day long whether I went on dates, was I wild, were shiksa girls like me easy, he’d always heard that we were, and finally complaining to the bosses, who shrugged and said, “He’s old and blind, what’s he gonna do?”

Sort of like when I went with my cousins to an island in the Caribbean, and we walked into a club and someone immediately, drunkenly, grabbed my crotch, and I turned around and left, and my cousin was disappointed in me for ruining the fun.

Or walking happily to work one day in the spring sunshine, past the fire station, and having one of the heroes sunning himself outside remark to me, to the delight of his comrades, that I’d be beautiful if I lost about 12 pounds. And spending the rest of my walk thinking of things I could have said but didn’t.

Or sitting on an airplane as the guy next to me, a cute young guy, too, falls “asleep” and somehow has his slumbering hand come to rest between my thighs, or on a train where the guy standing right in front of me exposes himself to me, or walking past a car, ditto, or walking through a park, ditto, or walking down a long hotel corridor, ditto.

And those tremulous moments of breathless fear on the way home when a man comes out of the shadows toward me—it’s laughable to think that we’re castigated for crossing the street when we see a group of African-American men come toward us, because I can’t count the number of times when I’ve crossed the street to avoid just one single man of any age or race, holding my keys pointed outward in my fist, just in case, as though keys trump knives or even muscles. And the seconds between opening the street door and the vestibule door in my no-doorman building, those moments that every woman knows are the most dangerous, because you are trapped like a gasping goldfish in an empty bowl.

Or cutting short a hiking trip with my sister because times had changed, and suddenly being a couple of young women in the forest alone was scary for reasons more vital than losing one’s food to a bear. Or buying a dog once I moved to the country, because I couldn’t keep checking all the closets every night.

And now I have a gorgeous teenaged daughter who works at a bodega in Collegetown that is besieged some afternoons by students buying beer and ping pong balls, and I ask her whether she ever feels threatened by them or by her male boss, and she flips her hand and says, “Nothing I can’t handle.”

And I know exactly what she means, because that’s what we do.

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I Thought They Were Lawyers

Statistics I find show that 37 percent of today's U.S. Senators are lawyers. Yet the body as a whole seems to misunderstand the underlying principles of our system of justice, including the notion that all defendants, even the wickedest, should be afforded competent counsel. How else to explain the ridiculous failure to confirm Debo Adegbile as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? Cynthia Tucker calls out Bob Casey, but there is enough idiocy to go around.

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Beware of White Boys

Leonard Pitts is on to something.

If, then, the reasoning is that we are entitled to demand extra scrutiny of people who meet a profile associated with random violence, can we expect arguments for the mass surveillance of young white boys any time soon? Of course not. You won’t even see random school shootings framed in racial dimensions by the media, even though those dimensions are glaringly obvious.

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Inviting the Viper

One can only hope that they eject Ted Nugent at the door. It's a sign of the times that someone thinks this is a good idea.

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NRA Nuttiness

Shouldn't an earnest comparison of today's U.S. with Nazi Germany, combined with veiled or unveiled threats against leadership, be enough to signal a serious mental illness that warrants having one's guns taken away?

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Stumbling Toward Grace

What a relief it would be to fold oneself in faith at a time like this, a time when there are no facts to fall back on and no reason to latch on to. It's taken a couple of days for me even to be able to talk about what happened at the elementary school in Connecticut. Paul and Olivia are watching part of the memorial service tonight, but that sort of thing gives me no comfort at all.

I remember very clearly dropping Olivia off for her first day at kindergarten. When she attended Pre-K at Newfield, Paul was there with her every day, so I'd never before had the feeling I had when she set off for Dryden Elementary that day—the sense that I was thrusting her into the world and would spend hours each day not knowing whether she was okay. I knew and trusted her teacher; it was the world I didn't trust. Just a year or two before, there had been an incident at that school involving a kindergarten teacher and her ex-boyfriend. That time, no one had been injured. The district quickly implemented new rules about entry into the schools. Things returned to normal. But it was always in the back of my mind, the idea that this place whose safety I required and expected might not be entirely benign.

The progressivism that represents my belief system is at least as optimistic as most religions are—like religion, and unlike conservatism, it makes the future seem less scary. Progressivism or liberalism by its very nature assumes that a better future is possible. Whereas in religion the future is out of our hands, in politics it is entirely up to us. Contrasting religion and politics through the lens of Deborah Tannen's work on men and women in conversation, the former might be female and the latter male, with prayer being a search for empathy and political speech a call for action.

The president's speech at the memorial service tonight, which I did take a break to listen to, was a cozy combination of religion and politics. I'm sure he will get grief for comparing exurban Connecticut six-year-olds to drive-by victims in our nation's cities, but a child is a child and a gun is a gun. Not content to be the grief counselor in chief, he told his audience that he wants a political solution to the horror of mass murder.

Me, too. This amazing piece has streaked across the Internet today, to the extent that for a while I thought it was apocryphal. (If you can't access it there, because too many people are trying, it's also available here, among dozens of other sites.) Just this past year, an adult son killed his mother in Cayuga Heights after years of mental health problems. It is clearly easier to purchase guns than it is to get adequate health care of any kind, and especially mental health care. So that's one place to start. As for guns, well, that's a tough conversation at any time, and this case doesn't provide easy entry. The gunman used legal weapons that belonged to his mother's collection. Why his mother had a collection, and why the guns weren't locked, and how he purchased ammunition for them all—those are all questions yet to be answered. The description of the shootings sounds to me like video game shootings—that kind of overkill, that kind of randomness. So do we need to start having first-amendment vs. safety conversations, too? I'm not sure, but probably. And we need to talk about whether we want our children's schools to resemble armed camps. Our local elementary schools will all have a visible police presence tomorrow. I'm not thrilled about that. And maybe we need to talk less about divine grace and more about interhuman mercy.

If there's any conclusion to be drawn from the past three days, it's that the current 24-hour media cycle is desperately broken. Not one thing we heard in the first few hours turned out to be true, down to the name of the assailant. Facts are still coming out that contradict things that were stated as gospel on the first day. It's not even about bad reporting, although there was plenty of that. It's about having to say something every minute of every day. If you talk incessantly, at least some of what you say is bound to be nonsense.

The binary belief that the president reflected briefly in his speech, the belief in good v. evil, is at best simplistic and at worst a roadblock to a solution. Yes, I can see that it's comforting. But once again, it's passive and accepting. I prefer not to accept mass murder as the new normal.

LATER: I should have included this, the best of many op eds this weekend.

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Enough Bromides

Kudos to NYC's mayor for having the guts to talk about gun control in light of this morning's Colorado shooting. So far, he's the only one.

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Required Reading

Gail Collins on how, as much as we'd like the AZ assassinations to be about rhetoric, they're really about guns. (When, just this summer, we hosted two Congressmen in our living room, security was the last thing on my mind. That has changed. Although it wasn't quite a public event, there were plenty of people I didn't know, and there was no security whatsoever. How terrible it will be for the democratic process if we can no longer achieve that kind of comfortable access.)

And over at Living in Dryden, Simon reminisces about a recent local example of violent rhetoric.

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Identity Theft

We got a call from a catalog company today asking for confirmation on an order we never placed (for over $600's worth of "African-American apparel and shoes for today's black woman"). Good thing they called, or we might never have known. Now we get to cancel our credit card and hope that's the end of it.

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The Guns of Spring

PZ sent me this well-written blog post on gun violence and our mythologizing of the Old West, where often, in fact, you had to check your guns at the city gates and pick them up when you left town.

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Binghamton.

The piled-on irony of a Vietnamese immigrant taking out fellow would-be American citizens from all over the world with semi-automatic handguns (permit, license, and registration required in NYS) is really too much for me. Will Binghamton now be known worldwide the way "Columbine" is, or are we now so used to this pattern of shared suicide that it'll just be a blip on the media radar? I guess it depends on how many books and documentaries we get out of it.

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What's Another Word for Spineless?

Hillary Clinton is a hero today, as is Chuck Schumer. Ditto Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, even John Kerry. Barack Obama? Not so much.

Democrats who voted YEA (may their names live in infamy): Baucus (MT), Bayh (IN), Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Conrad (ND), Feinstein (CA), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lincoln (AR), McCaskill (MO), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Pryor (AR), Rockefeller (WV), Salazar (CO), Webb (VA), Whitehouse (RI). It should be noted that at least three of those are being touted as VP possibilities.

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Psychopaths We Have Known

All of this second-guessing of Cho and his motivations reminds me of our experiences when Jeff Dahmer was finally apprehended. Dahmer was a high school classmate of Paul's and Bill's in Akron, and both had hung out with him and visited his home. Now we were getting calls from Oprah (which Paul refused to take) and others, hoping that Paul might explain to Americans how to recognize a psychopath. But both Bill and Paul agree that out of their high school population, Dahmer would not even have been in the top ten "most likely to be a serial killer."

The point is that for all our desire to separate good from evil in understandable, visible ways, there's no real way to tell whether the guy next to you is likely to eat human flesh or take a handgun to school. It does appear that, unlike Dahmer, Cho tried pretty hard to get people to stop him.

LATER: Phil set the following thought.

I was appalled that NBC chose to air the video of the deranged Virginia Tech killer on network news. Cho was clearly insane, but, ironically, he was shrewd and lucid enough to understand that a major network would be sufficiently profit-driven to promulgate his diatribe against the world, no matter what civic dangers this might entail. By taking the bait, NBC has not only fulfilled a murderer's messianic fantasies (essentially rewarding him) but also gave hundreds of other mentally unstable, aggrieved young men a hero to imitate. I'm sure that the broadcast legitimized him their eyes, much as the Columbine killers seem to have inspired and legitimized his own rampage. I can't think of a more glaring instance of media irresponsiblity than this. NBC should be held responsible when (not if) copy cats begin making and carrying out threats in colleges and high schools around the country. It was sickening enough to watch Brian Williams emote on national television as he interviewed campus survivors (the self-appointed senstive guy who feels for the nation), but this kind of self-indulgant bathos seems peculiarly hypocritical when the same newscast tries to so cyncially to boost its ratings by with a "multi-media" video that panders to America's morbid fascination with violent pathologies. I hope that NBC will be held accountable by those portions of the journalistic establishment that still hold their profession to ethical scrutiny.

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