| | | | How to Prevent the "American Tragedy" | | We don't yet know what laws -- if any -- might have prevented the shooting in Las Vegas. But the responses to other threats to public safety suggest that even a series of "modest steps" can make a dramatic difference, writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. Automobile safety is a good example.
"By my calculations, we've reduced the auto fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by more than 95 percent since 1921. There was no single solution but rather many incremental efforts: seatbelts, air bags, padded dashboards, better bumpers, lighted roads, highway guardrails, graduated licenses for young people, crackdowns on drunken driving, limits on left turns, and so on. We haven't banned automobiles, and we haven't eliminated auto deaths, but we have learned to make them safer -- and we should do the same with guns," Kristof writes.
"The gun lobby will say that this isn't a time for politics. But if we can't learn the lesson from this carnage, then there will be more such shootings -- again and again. This is a particularly American tragedy and completely unnecessary." - To beat gun violence, target the bullets, suggests Joanna Pearlstein in Wired. "Roughly 10 billion rounds are manufactured in the U.S. each year, with a weight equal to two Titanics," she writes.
"If you can't constrain supply, you have to go after demand. Some of the smartest 'gun control' proposals are actually about bullets, with the goal of making ammo more difficult to purchase or use in large quantities."
Among the proposals? Banning large capacity magazines, requiring buyers to have a license to purchase ammunition, and taxing bullets "at a rate that reflects their cost to society."
| | Why Spain's Government Got Violent in Catalonia | | It seems inevitable that the tough response to Catalonia's independence referendum will invigorate rather than diminish the region's separatist movement. So what was behind the central government's heavy-handed tactics, which saw hundreds injured in a violent crackdown by police? An administration desperately worried about the economic consequences of a split, argues Jonah Shepp in New York Magazine.
"Indeed, the economy is a major reason why many residents of Catalonia want out of Spain and why Madrid is desperate not to let it go: Catalonia has the highest GDP of any of Spain's regions, accounting for nearly a fifth of the country's economic output. It also pays about 20 percent of the country's taxes, while receiving only 14 percent of national government expenditures. If Spain is struggling now, it will struggle much harder without Catalonia, whereas pro-independence Catalans believe they would be much better off if they didn't have to send so much of their money to Madrid," Shepp writes.
"[C]onditions of political and economic stagnation put Spain in an especially fragile state. When the stakes are so high, it's easy to see how a cornered head of government might resort to authoritarian tactics to prevent his country from fracturing even further."
| | What Trump Must Say About War With North Korea | | If President Trump really believes that the U.S. has no choice but to launch a preventative war against North Korea, then he needs to do a far better job of preparing the American public for it, writes Kori Schake in The Atlantic. Tweets are no substitute for a real conversation with the public.
"When presidents do not prepare the public for the consequences, the backlash is severe. President Clinton never regained the public's confidence on national security after the Somalia debacle, in which Americans thought U.S. forces were delivering humanitarian assistance and found out they were, instead, fighting warlords. President Bush had to invest most of his second term in salvaging the Iraq war after underselling the difficulty U.S. efforts would face," Schake writes.
"A preventative war against North Korea will be a war of choice for the United States. Diplomacy is an essential step in convincing the American public that the government has no choice less dangerous and damaging than war. President Trump forecloses that conversation at his peril; when the costs begin to accrue, he will wish he had bothered to bring the American public along because otherwise they will blame him for the consequences." - America's H-bomb disaster. Anyone wondering about the potential dangers of an H-Bomb test in light of the Kim regime's recent threat to conduct one need only look at America's own history. And specifically back to March 1954, Larry Greenemeier writes for Scientific American.
The Castle Bravo test "remains the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested by the U.S., about 1,000 times stronger than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II," Greenemeier writes. The "detonation unleashed a 15-megaton blast that was two-and-a-half times greater than expected. (A megaton has the explosive force of one million tons of TNT.) It also resulted in the largest nuclear contamination accident in U.S. history, as shifting winds carried radioactive fallout across the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Ailinginae and Utirik as well as Rongerik -- where U.S. servicemen were stationed -- in the central Pacific's Marshall Islands."
| | How Trump Can Curb Iran's Ambitions | | If President Trump wants to curb Iran's influence in the region then scrapping the nuclear deal is the wrong way to go about it, writes Max Boot in Foreign Policy. Instead, the U.S. should "provide support to militias in both Iraq and Syria willing to resist the Iranian interlopers."
"In the case of Iraq, that would mean insisting that, once the Islamic State is defeated, the government disband the Popular Mobilization Forces, made up mostly of Iranian-backed militias, and create a Sunni civil guard to protect Sunni areas from Shiite aggression. That will not be easy to do, but the United States can gain important leverage if it does not bring its troops home after the Islamic State is defeated -- if, that is, it does not repeat the mistake that former President Barack Obama made in 2011," Boot says.
"In Syria, the United States could push back against Iran by expanding the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting the Islamic State in the north, recruiting more Arab fighters along with the core Kurdish forces, and also by providing fresh support to the Free Syrian Army in western and southern Syria."
| | President Trump is scheduled to travel to Puerto Rico on Tuesday. He will find an island that was already reeling economically even before it was devastated by Hurricane Maria, CNN Money reports. "The island has been in recession for 11 years and has lost 10% of its population in that time. In May, it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history."
Nobel Prizes are being announced this week, including the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Richard Evans dives into the history of the Peace Prize in Foreign Policy, and suggests it is time that the Committee learn from its mistakes – and consider rescinding some of those awards, if necessary. That could include the prize for Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi. "It is surely time for the Nobel Committee to revise its rules and procedures to take account of the changing nature of the Peace Prize. If the tradition-soaked institution of the British monarchy can take away awards from the unworthy, the progressive burghers of Norway can surely manage the same trick." | | | | | | |
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