My hope is that the whatckjob backlash will demonstrate conclusively to everyone else how nutty these people are. The backlash backlash with be more powerful than the backlash.
My hope is that people will start spelling whatckjob with a "t".
I foresee a revival of the militia movement in some form or another. Those whackadoodles never really went away, and the NRA is absolutely committed to feeding their most insane fantasies.
I think that Timothy McVeigh was a wake-up call for many of the unemployed guys who had thought this way. My personal hope is that stockpiling weapons will look as sensible as building a bomb shelter-- there will still be people who do it, but less harm.
IMO the problem is not crazies hoarding gold, canned food, and weaponry, but rather widely dispersed weapons and freely operating dealers. Shutting down the dealers would help Mexico a lot, and having more households quietly deciding that we just don't want a gun in the house anymore will help domestically.
The backlash backlash with be more powerful than the backlash.
I'd be delighted if you could support that with any convincing evidence. The number of people who will wring their hands and deplore the backlash will certainly outnumber the whackjobs by several orders of magnitude; the number of people who will do anything about it, however, remains to be seen.
That's already happened, hasn't it? TBH a lot of the whole nut scene just seems to be stuff familiar from the 90s that never went away. "Preppers": survivalists, just someone made a TV show. Teabaggers: tax-protestor/Ron Paul racist newsletter types. Gun nuts: gun nuts. Newt Gingrich: Newt Gingrich. Bibi: Bibi.
I'd be delighted if you could support that with any convincing evidence.
Umm...does my profound faith in the human spirit count as evidence?
It has moved me to not consider you a total whatckjob.
Does my profound cynicism about the human spirit refute you?
I think that Timothy McVeigh was a wake-up call for many of the unemployed guys who had thought this way.
Huh? A bombing nearly twenty years ago has any bearing on the Tea Party style fanaticism that's escalated in the past four years?
10 is unfair. The overwhelming majority of people are in favour of good and opposed to evil. They just think it's somebody else's job to do anything about it.
TBH a lot of the whole nut scene just seems to be stuff familiar from the 90s that never went away.
No, it never went away, but it was less virulent under Bush because it was legitimized under Islamophobia and various wars. Under Obama it once again believed it was threatened and has come roaring back with extra racism and gun nuttiness.
My impulse is to say that "the militia movement" is already reviving - and in a quick search the SPLC agrees - but that during the revival militias have either kept a lower profile, or been granted one by media inattention. I might instead hope that a consequence of gun control advocacy from the bully pulpit would be a revival in the notice given militias, with maybe a concomitant shift toward investigation and confrontation on the part of the government and press.
12 was meant to be explicitly to 4, and to have my name on it.
@11
I suppose the OC bombing demonstrated that it is at least theoretically possible to shame these folks back under their rocks.* As I recall, there really was a sharp drop in enthusiasm for militia related chest thumping after OC.
Of course that required hundreds of people being murdered, so not so encouraging really.
* or at least it was possible ~20 years ago. The country as a whole does seem crazier today.
11. The "militias" and the "freemen" were pretty prominent in the early nineties in OH and MI, I don't know about farther west or in the south. They were basically gone by 1997.
I distinguish people who actually own heavy weapons from people who bloviate about the second amendment. I'm not too interested in talk. Gun ownership overall in the US is on the decline (fewer households now than a few years back, long-term trend). I haven't seen the breakdown with the fraction of gun owners who own something bigger than a pistol or hunting rifle.
I don't know anyone who bloviates about the 2nd amendment and doesn't own guns.
Gun ownership is on the decline, households-wise, but it's sky-rocketed, numbers-of-guns-wise. I really do see comment threads on Facebook where someone says "I'm looking for ammo for my such and such ordinary gun...ideas?" and then the thread is all people saying "Cabela's is sold out of everything. Academy is sold out of everything. Try such-n-such a store."
These are mostly hunters/shooting range enthusiasts who I don't think are whackjobs, mostly because I don't think they ever think about politics. Their mostly-dormant beliefs are nutty, though.
Gun ownership overall in the US is on the decline
Whether that's a good sign depends on the political breakdown of the people getting rid of their guns. If all the liberals are going gun free, the dangerous nutjobs can still be armed to the teeth and the overall numbers are still declining.
My impulse is to say that "the militia movement" is already reviving - and in a quick search the SPLC agrees
The SPLC does good stuff, I think, but its communications are very donation-oriented; I suspect they would have said the same at any point in the past decade.
I don't think people are getting rid of their guns so much as younger households aren't getting guns as often.
I've already seen otherwise sane people (including a lesbian friend who is currently in training to be a police officer in a California coastal town* while spending a lot of her time fighting for marriage equality**) start posting rumours (on FB, where else?) that Obama is about to ban all assault weapons, and is going to redefine semi-automatic weapons as assault weapons. This has led to numerous comments about running out to buy them now and other stock-piling behaviours.
*Where I grew up, which like much of California is split between the quite liberal and the quite conservative without a lot of actual moderates.
**Example included solely because it makes my head spin. I 'get' the washout from the CHP who posts constantly about guns, but from her it really causes severe cognitive dissonance. (I know it shouldn't, but she's just so liberal otherwise!)
I continue to be surprised that the SPLC is still called the SPLC rather than the "International Racism Monitoring Group" or something. The first three words of their name seem to be unrelated to anything in their mission.
19.2: I've seen that to, except they weren't hunters. And in California, not Texas.
19. No offense, but don't you live in a barren hell far from a big city? The WaPo article about gun demographics suggested that the urban/rural split is sharpening. In the US as elsewhere, the population is draining into the cities. For whatever it's worth, there are many thoughtful suburban contrarians who will talk but not act.
I'm not psychic and I could well be wrong, but these are the demographics that guide my outlook. I'm honestly not that interested in the mindset of the idiots, though their individual biographies seem relevant. When I lived in OH, the people I came in contact who talked this way were disenfranchised former factory workers, not young, who were having a hard time finding work.
No offense, but don't you live in a barren hell far from a big city?
My examples, which aren't far off from Heebie's, come from a place continually rated as one of the best places to live in the United States. It is, however, somewhat rural.
If we're talking about the 27% whackjob damage, doesn't it strengthen my anecdata that I live in a barren wasteland in a time of sharpening urban/rural divide? We're not talking about the trend of the sane 70% of the country.
I thought that CA was like WA, in that the coast is dense and urban, but east of the hills is much more conservative politically, also sparsely populated.
Maybe that's wrong?
To my line of thinking, what matters is population density and personal economic situation, maybe age also.
21: That alarm bell rang lightly for me as well, but there's a facially reasonable mechanism for the timing they're reporting on this occasion, and I bet that given the range of groups they try to count they would be able, in most years, to produce and flog a chart which is both sufficiently alarming for their use and sufficiently true for my use.
29. It's a real phenomenon, so yes hearing the reports is useful. I guess my question is how much of this is panic buying that ends up in the garage or storage locker of someone elderly, and so less likely to go off and shoot someone. Weapons in easy reach of someone young and pissed off or depressed is cause for concern, but is an unknowable quantity.
30: Sort of? I'm sure if you divided my county by the coast range it would fit that definition better, but in my region you have a mix of conservatives and liberals cheek-by-jowl. Probably something to do with it being a rural place with a decent university and gorgeous beaches. I just meant to say, it's not just Texas with a problem.
And the people I'm seeing talking about it are mid-20s to mid-30s.
34. Too bad. The fortyish people that have posted about weapons in my fb feed are HS acquaintances, one a screwball academic and one a pizza delivery guy in the city.
But I'm middle aged, and have under 200 fb friends, most of whom stay quiet.
The concept of "a rural place with a decent university and gorgeous beaches" may establish your location more clearly than you intend. I can barely think of a single place that fits this description.
OP is on point and absolutely right.
There's already a Newtown "truther" movement that believes (or, among the instigators, perhaps purports to believe) that the child massacre there was orchestrated by the federal government as the first step in President Obama's long-planned push to ban all semi-automatic weapons and severely restrict ammunition sales (if not repeal the Second Amendment altogether). Whatever the President says tomorrow, it will be seen in that light amongst the zealots, and the press will cover it as follows: the NRA and Newtown "truthers" on one extreme, the President on the other, and the responsible middle course is, naturally, to do nothing.
As a gun owner, I find this wholly depressing.
36: Oh, I didn't really intend to keep it anonymous, just didn't want to say the name directly. Also I'm a little homesick, so gorgeous beaches might be a stretch. And I only refer to it as rural (I would have called it suburban) as that's how all the major news outlets referred to it when we had an earthquake years ago.
the press will cover it as follows: the NRA and Newtown "truthers" on one extreme, the President on the other, and the responsible middle course is, naturally, to do nothing.
As a gun owner, I find this wholly depressing.
I agree with NCP.
I am also getting about 8 emails a day from gun groups asking for money. It has been insane.
From where I stand, nothing in the past four years has come within a mile of legitimating any rightwing fears until this.
HG can't even see that Obama is black.
There's already a Newtown "truther" movement that believes (or, among the instigators, perhaps purports to believe) that the child massacre there was orchestrated by the federal government....
[Grinding teeth in inarticulate rage at the pluperfect self-serving stupidity of this phenomenon.]
For whatever it's worth, there are many thoughtful suburban contrarians who will talk but not act.
And the thoughtful urbanites will be on the streets in force?
The basic configurations will be based on who's got the most ears in DC, which is unlikely to see much change absent big outside movement.
37, 43: honestly, is anyone surprised by this? Crazy people are crazy. The Internet makes it easy for them to gather with like-minded crazies. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.
Turning to the OP, the problem is that no meaningful legislation is getting through Congress, which means that if anything is going to come of the nation's collective rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, it will have to come via Executive Order. Actually, I'm not sure that's a problem, as President Obama probably won't be reelected no matter what, and though I love Vice President Biden with the fire of a thousand suns, I'd prefer that he not win the nomination four years from now. So if the Executive Branch wants to go all in on guns, I think that's stupid but probably not so stupid that I'll bother caring very much. Still, it won't just be the crazies who call President Obama a tyrant.
"Thoughtful" said with a sneer above, I could have used quotes. I agree that perceived popularity will affect any new legislation, which is a shame, since I think that the changes necessary to regulate "private" sales and block straw buyers would go a long way to mitigating harm without touching in-state crackpots willing to present ID.
Nobody banned bomb shelters, but they're no longer popular.
Further to 42, I wonder if Obama is finally realizing that the nuttiness of the opposition gives him a lot more freedom of action than he's taken advantage of so far.
If you behave like Bob Dole and the opposition's rank-and-file nonetheless calls you a Kenyan socialist Muslim terrorist, and if the opposition's political leaders are seriously threatening to crash the economy purely out of spite, well, you really don't have to worry any more about crafting a compromise.
Nobody banned buggy whips either, but they're hard to find these days (though I'm sure apo knows a good source). Which is to say, bomb shelters are unpopular, I suspect, because there's no Cold War. Unfortunately, I can't imagine how to convince white men, who cling to their guns and their religion, that there's no threat of tyranny in this country, especially when they believe that Fareed Zakaria is fronting for the UN and the Islamic Brotherhood.
48: Have you tried telling them that, as fully accredited conspirator, you know for a fact that there is no tyranny scheduled for this country until 2045?
- Reducing the number of bullets from 10 to 7 doesn't seem like much of an improvement. Are there differences in guns able to fire 10 vs. 7? Or is it just that you could kill only 28 people in a few minutes rather than 40?
- Is anyone talking publicly about ways to reduce gun deaths in non-massacre circumstances (accidents, suicides, and domestic violence)?Because I'm not hearing anything.
I'm sure apo knows a good source
50: I think current capacities are much higher than 10.
Is anyone talking publicly about ways to reduce gun deaths in non-massacre circumstances (accidents, suicides, and domestic violence)? Because I'm not hearing anything.
Nope.
53: I can't think of anything you could do in those situations, short of removing guns altogether.
54: Remove the lead from guns?
50, 53: Scientists from major universities are speaking out about the need to fund research on gun violence.
I can't believe we have to advocate for this.
One simple feature that could prevent some gun accidents is a safety that stops guns with removable magazines from being fired without a magazine in the gun. That comes up from time to time.
I'm kind of curious if a tax on certain kinds of guns (a potential middle ground (barf, I know)) would be upheld by today's Supreme Court.
Not under the commerce clause, it wouldn't.
55: It's a pretty elaborate set-up for one decent punchline ("Push-button ignitions can suck it.").
@57
I haven't done anything to verify the claim, but I recently heard a public health researcher say that government funding for any kind of investigation into correlations between guns and and violence (or even rates of accidental harm) has been comprehensively shut down since sometime in the mid-90s.
62: Congress passed a law, I believe at the start of Clinton's second term, effectively outlying federal expenditures on research into guns. I'll find a cite.
50: Even us ancients can change a magazine in under a second. Those six-year-olds trained in the new swarming technique need to be selected for very fast reaction times.
62,63: I remember when this happened. The NRA lobbied to have all research on gun violence shut down. I believe they went after the CDC in particular (or was it NIH?).
53: I can't think of anything you could do in those situations, short of removing guns altogether.
Gun safes? Trigger locks? So many accidents and suicides are by kids using their parents' guns. (As was the Newtown shooter.)
Safes are hard to enforce, I know.
What are different options for trigger locks and how hard are they to circumvent?
62,63,65: There was an appalling storyon NPR earlier this week that discussed the policy.
62: The Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act specifies that: "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control."
In practice this seems to have had a chilling effect beyond the actual words. As I recall one year in the '90s the CDC budget was cut by the exact amount of the prior year's spend on gun safety.
66: there are biometric* safeties that could work, I'm led to believe. I believe that a chip can be placed in the grip, and only the owner can then fire the gun.
* This is probably the wrong word.
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Someone please tell me not to start arguing about the debt crisis with a college friend on FB, right now.
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Maybe nudge the conversation towards an argument about gun control instead?
Don't. Why would you bother? Surely there are actual walls into which you can bang your head close at hand instead.
Argue with them about Israel instead.
haha, the original status was something like "Can we not get distracted by these gun control issues so that we can focus on the real problems, the debt crisis?"
The problem is that this is someone I thought was smart and insightful a dozen years ago, and it hurts to re-categorize him.
Also microstamping is a pretty good idea, right? Trace every bullet back to its gun.
Though I've got plenty of evidence that re-categorization needs to happen.
The problem is that this is someone I thought was smart and insightful a dozen years ago, and it hurts to re-categorize him.
Perfect FB comment! "You are someone I thought was smart and insightful a dozen years ago, and it hurts to re-categorize you." What could go wrong?
(My actual experience is that when it becomes painful to see the idiot a friend has become, it is time to hide that friend's updates from my feed.)
"...it hurts me more than it hurts you..." would probably be even better.
75:
I will admit to having similar frustrations about the gun discussions. I think JRoth made a comment in another thread about how rare these shootings are. How much time and energy are we going to spend on a topic with no real change?
Many schools in my area already have a police officer at the school. They call them school resource officers. I dont like the idea of arming teachers, but I also kind of feel like if someone has a concealed handgun permit then they should be able to bring it to work. (eh, maybe I am on the fence about that one.) An employer should be able to ban guns from their place of employment so let each school system decide for themselves.
We should imrove the background check system. It is atrocious.
I dont really care about AR-15s and am not really convinced that outlawing automatic weapons or high-capacity weapons is going to change much. (I dont really care if you ban them, but I dont think it is happening.) Amost all handguns are semi-automatic and changing clips is easy.
I think JRoth's comment was something like "There is no way to stop all shootings. Right now, they happen .00001 percent of the time. Why do we think anything we do will reduce that percentage?"
changing clips is easy.
If you're sober, sure.
In Va, you are not allowed to be under the influence of alcohol is you have a concealed handgun permit and you are carrying a handgun in a public place.
Law enforcement officers are specifically exempted from that law.
Last year, there was an effort to EXPAND that exemption to retired Commonwealth's Attorneys.
You cannot make this stuff up.
it hurts to re-categorize him
Don't think of it as him becoming a worse person. Think of it as you becoming a better one.
Fine. I withdraw my implied suggestion that requiring people with guns to be drunk is a useful gun safety measure.
You can be drunk in public with your gun. But not if you have a concealed handgun permit. The ban only applies to people with permits.
Drunk and unconcealed will almost certainly bring the police.
there are biometric* safeties that could work
Presumably people will argue that this will make guns too expensive.
66: All the trigger locks I have or have or seen can be easily removed with simple tools like a bolt cutter, big diagonal pliers, hammer & chisel, etc.
They're good enough to stop a small child, trivial to remove by determined thirteen-year-old.
Better is the removal of bolts or slides and the locking those in a serious lockbox or safe. That's what I did when we had kids and kid's friends in and out of the place.
Yeah, I guess there are ways to make accidental discharges less likely. I was thinking of the domestic violence/suicide part of the statement. In those cases, the guns are working the way they're supposed to.
Except suicides with a parent's gun, which aren't uncommon.
At the Austin meetup I noticed a sign at the bar forbidding concealed carry, but with a large semi-transparent "51%" over the text. Apparently in Texas concealed carry is only illegal in restaurants/bars that get more than 51% of their income from alcohol.
Has anyone linked this Sam Harris article? Parts of it are persuasive; parts less so. I saw it because my creepy college friend who mostly posts shirtless pictures of guys 20 years younger than himself linked and quoted the article and I was so shocked to see something other than a pouty twink, I clicked through.
Just think: if he'd had a gun safe, the neo-Nazi scumbag killed by his 10-year-old would still be alive.
94. He's a gun guy suggesting that the private sale loophole be closed and also that gun owners be licensed and tested. If those views become widespread, especially among NRA donors, that would be great.
His words about competent guards are unrealistic fantasy.
His words about competent guards are unrealistic fantasy.
Yeah. I am amused by the way security guards, in the abstract, become father-hero-protector. Tons of my clients work in security. If a lot of the people pushing this idea had any idea about the individuals they are seeking to arm and put in charge of their children, they'd have some cognitive dissonance to resolve.
For a while I thought that the security guards around here had some kind of OCD. They always carried a small club in their hands and always touched the same place on the wall every time they passed.
75: The problem is that this is someone I thought was smart and insightful a dozen years ago, and it hurts to re-categorize him.
I haven't had a very high opinion of my dad since I was maybe 3, but after seeing what he gets up to on twitter over the last year, I now have near total contempt for him. It's not a nice feeling.
19: "Cabela's is sold out of everything. Academy is sold out of everything. Try such-n-such a store."
I've been wondering when this was going to pop up again. I think the firearms & ammunition industry did very well from their ginned-up "ammunition shortage" in 2009. I am sure they are looking forward to doing even more business than they are right now over the coming months.
I don't really give a shit about the 2nd amendment, which is about as useful to people of my persuasion as the other 26 tend to be. And I don't own guns myself, for most values of "own". But I am a little concerned about all of this. When GWB Cheney did this kind of thing 10 years ago, everyone on the left rightly saw it as pure demagoguery and abuse of executive power. Now I've got people on my FB that I can usually count on having a reasonably radical take on things jumping on the "ban 'em all, let God sort 'em out" bandwagon. Depressing. As I've said before, folx would do well to remember that the whole Eric Rudolph/Tim McVeigh series of outrages started with a seriously fucked up FBI raid on the homestead of a guy whose only crime was non-violently violating gun laws. And for that they killed his wife. And that's without even getting into the MOVE bombing.
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Who the fuck publishes a loose-leaf calendar? This turned out to be essentially 12 (very pretty) individual monthly posters. What an inconvenience!
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This article says that the phrase "well regulated militias" refers specifically to slave patrols, organized by the plantation owners, to prevent slave uprisings, and ingeneral, the second amendment was passed to presever slavery. Why haven't I ever heard this before? Why don't constitutional originalists talk about this? Can lawyers here tell me whether this reading is accurate?
In case this hasn't appeared in a previous thread, a couple of gun enthusiasts in my town helpfully educated the locals on their rights by walking around with their AR-15s, prompting panicked 911 calls and a lockdown by a local daycare. "It was a good day," one of them said.
Addendum to 103: This was just a few miles from Clackamas Town Center, where there was a mass shooting just a few days before the child slaughter in Connecticut.
Rather than publish gun registry information, newspapers should put photos from the Newtown classrooms on their front pages. If we're supposed to be confronting the issue, we might as well be honest about it.
- Is anyone talking publicly about ways to reduce gun deaths in non-massacre circumstances (accidents, suicides, and domestic violence)?Because I'm not hearing anything.
Slashdot had a couple posts on context-aware smart guns of various sorts, but I didn't follow the links.
100.2: Friend of mine went to a gun show last week, was startled to hear what sounded like the sellers openly treating the (frenzied, five-times-list) buyers as short-term fools.
Why haven't I ever heard this before?
Because it's mostly not true. Or at least it's exaggerated enough to flirt with the truthiness/outright lie boundary.
105.last: Buy as soon as the massacre hits the wires, sell when NRA starts talking to the media again.
100 - I am 100% sure you didn't mean Eric Rudolph. Ruby Ridge/Randy Weaver?
102 -- I think it's quite the stretch. Henry's speech against ratification certainly raises the specter of a federal abolition undertaken as a defense measure. Nothing about the Second Amendment affects this one way or the other. Mason, similarly, didn't like the idea of putting the militia under federal control: the Second Amendment didn't resolve this in his favor either. (I haven't read it lately, but I don't recall the Second Amendment playing any role in Justice Story's opinion in Martin v. Mott.)
Really, the argument in the article amounts to little more than the assertion that militias were only, or primarily, for the purpose of suppression of slave revolts. While this was surely among their purposes in the slave states, I don't see how anyone who lived through the Revolution could have thought it was their only purpose. And why would the original Vermont constitution have an analogue to the Second Amendment? (That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State; and, as standing armies, in the time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.)
Is anyone talking publicly about ways to reduce gun deaths in non-massacre circumstances (accidents, suicides, and domestic violence)?Because I'm not hearing anything.
Universal first-aid training that covers gunshot wounds? (It has the added benefit of encouraging a more responsible attitude towards deadly weapons of all kinds.)
Give the NRA credit: they're all in.
Also, this is probably silly, but I wonder what would happen if we made a rule that you had to donate blood in order to buy a gun.
For some people it is. But it's the safe-for-work kind.
113 to 111. And I'm not allowed to donate blood because I spent too much time on knife-crime island.
114: I'm not at work. It's ten thirty and I'm in an bar.
116: I think it's a safe-for-the-bar link. You can trust me.
I have a 200mb data plan on my phone. I'll wait until I'm at work.
109.2: an analogue to the second amendment also exists in the original Bill of Rights: "That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law".
Note: this wasn't saying "only Protestants can be armed". It was saying "we are revoking the order of James II & VII that (some) Protestants were to be disarmed, while Catholics were still allowed to bear arms. From now on, Parliament alone gets to decide who can bear arms and who can't - it's not up to the King".
I mean, totally predictable (and predicted) bullshit, but bullshit nevertheless.
On the up side, it looks like the "No you're not even allowed to research gun violence" rule discussed in 62,63,65&68 has been overturned by executive order.
122: hoping for? As I've said before, I gave up hope on this issue a long time ago. And so this was, I'm afraid, exactly what I expected. Still, it's dispiriting to watch the president talk so tough and then do so little. And now we get to watch Congress do nothing at all. Whee!
108: I was under the impression that Ruby Ridge had at least some effect on Rudolph's motivations. Can't find a cite for it, but he was definitely of that same milieu.
Obama also aimed to thaw what the White House called a "freeze" in scientific research of gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control. And he urged Congress to bankroll the CDC to do research into possible linkages between violent video games and other media images and real-life violence, to the tune of $10 million. "We don't benefit from ignorance," Obama said. "We don't benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence."
This is one of the stupidest things a President has ever said.
1. There is no epidemic of violence. Just the opposite, in fact.
2. Violent video games and media images are available all over the world, with minimal effect on gun death numbers.
3. If he really wanted to help people out and prevent little kids from being killed, he would END THE DRUG WAR!
Jackass.
Also, remember how stoked everybody was about gay marriage gaining ground in the 2012 election? Kiss that goodbye. 2014 will see record turnouts of Republicans and right-leaning independents. No positive social change is going to be possible through the electoral system for the next several election cycles, at least.