It’s the last issue of the year! And it’s the first issue of next year, too, kinda, seeing as it’ll be on the stands for the first few days of 2008.
In any case, here it is, our new issue, fully readable online. Feel free to comment on its contents here.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2007.
It was alright. Getting a little worn, though.
I’m really glad to see Literacy Volunteers of Tucson get a firm mention thanks to Mari Herreras. The LVT seems to be doing great things, and I hope this increases the volunteer numbers. Cesar Castellanos’ example also shows that English literacy is still an important skill to have. (Admittedly, I beat that drum hard, but I strongly believe more literacy = more communication, and more communication = more understanding, collectivism and intelligent discourse.)
More literacy leads to more intelligent discourse? Haven’t you seen the comments posted at the Star/Citizen sites? Those posters technically count as literate, but …
Great article by Jonathan Hoffman, and not just because I agree with it. You’ll take heat from a lot of your readers for running it, but its a good piece on an emotional issue that deserves airing. Not a lot of alt papers would run it and TW deserves some praise for it.
James, okay that’s a good point. Perhaps I should say higher literacy levels lead to more intelligent discourse ?
I read but I am sick. Does that make me ill-literate?
When you’re doing reading the Tucson Weekly’s yearly roundup, check out Rolling Stones magazine’s Dickheads of the Year list by Bill Maher!
Since nobody is talking in this blog thread (what, are you all on vacation?) here’s an Associated Press article about new “employer sanctions” against illegal immigration in Arizona.
I’ll be very interested to see how the Tucson Weekly covers this. The article quotes Judity Gans, a University of Arizona “immigration policy expert.” (Note: Beware of the dreaded moniker of “expert”! What is Gans’s actual title, and in what discipline?)
From the article: “Industries will shrink and prices will go up,” Gans told AFP. The price of a hamburger, a head of lettuce, and a week’s worth of gardening services will all increase as workforces shrink, Gans said.
What Gans doesn’t mention is that employers who hire illegal immigrants also undercut their competition. The lack of enforcement against such employers is a de-facto punishment against employers who strive to maintain legal hiring practices. But who cares as long as it positively benefits the consumer wallet, right? Or so Gans is arguing.
Also: “Illegal immigrants “are filling gaps in the labor force, and as those gaps widen, prices will go up,” she said. “That theory is not contested.”
This might be true when it comes to agriculture, which depends on migrant workers. Whether there are truly “gaps” in the labor force for other industries is questionable. What also happens is that the profit margin rises for businesses that exploit illegal workers, and that profit margin drops when those businesses are held accountable. Whether this results in higher consumer prices is uncertain. Supply and demand might balance it out and force businesses to accept a lower profit margin.
From the article: Workers, mainly from Mexico, flock to pick lettuce in Yuma, make sushi in Phoenix, and clean hotel rooms in Flagstaff.
I just want to point out how silly it is to compare lettuce-picking to sushi-making. Speaking as a person who has actually worked as a sushi maker in Phoenix, I can tell you that sushi making attracts far more legal workers than illegal or undocumented ones. (Incidentally, I make a mean caterpillar roll.)
“According to Gans’ study, they make up 59 percent of the workforce in farming; 27 percent in construction; 51 percent in landscaping; 26 percent in hotel work; 23 percent in restaurants; 33 percent in private homes; and 46 percent in textile manufacturing.”
Again, the savings from employing people at sub-minimum wage levels is not always passed along to the consumer. It is very often passed up to the unscrupulous employer in the form of an increased profit margin. Landscaping and construction costs are as high as they have ever been.
“Oh yeah, it’ll affect us,” said Jeremiah, the owner of Around Town Landscaping in Phoenix who estimated that the cost of having a garden mowed will go up 15 to 20 percent in 2008 as a result.
Boo hoo. Make the resorts pay more for keeping their water-wasting golf courses trimmed. Higher landscaping costs will result in more xeriscaping and desert landscaping. This is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.
“It’s not the right way to go. I don’t think people did their homework on it, and no one consulted small companies on how they feel about it,” he added.
Big companies have more to lose than small companies do. Framing this as an assault on small companies is fatuous in the extreme. The ones who really stand to lose are the big-monied big businesses. That’s why Republicans are loathe to enact real legislation to enforce immigration laws. Being in favor of lax standards against illegal immigration is equivalent to being in favor of a system that allows for massive exploitation of the work force with no standards. Why don’t more leftist people see this? They willfully blind themselves to this, while claiming that allowing an illegal system and underground to perpetuate itself is somehow a humanitarian position.
Construction costs won’t noticeably rise, said Julie Fenner, office manager of Hidden Valley Roofing in Phoenix. The company has always screened for proof of citizenship.
NOte: Here is an example of a business that plays by the rules and will therefore be unaffected.
Anyway, it’s an interesting article and a very interesting issue. I will be watching for future Tucson Weekly pieces on the subject.
What’s with the pro-gun guest column by Jonathan Hoffman?
Was the Tucson Weekly taken over by NRA loonies?
I don’t object to a sober and well-reasoned editorial that takes a stance I disagree with. Unfortunately Jonathan Hoffman’s piece was neither sober nor well-reasoned. His smarmy, know-it-all tone is precisely the reason that terms like “gun nut” and “NRA loonies” get coined. Seriously: What a f—wit.
Here are some of Hoffman’s arguments (paraphrased):
(1) Jonathan Hoffman: “Going postal” and “school shootings” are now common phrases; each location is a gun-free zone. There are no similar phrases like “shooting-range shootings” or “going police headquarters.” Therefore, places with guns everywhere are safer.
Response: Hoffman demonstrates his lack of Logic 101 reasoning skills here. If an argument based on colloquial phrases is the best he can do, why bother writing an editorial? Here is the antithesis to Hoffman’s argument: “Airports are also gun-free zones and yet there are no phrases associated with gun use in airports. Therefore, gun-free zones must be safe.” There – I just turned Hoffman’s stupid argument on its head and rendered it inane. Too easy.
(2) Hoffman: I read a book called “More Guns, Less Crime” and saw a book called “In Search of the 2nd Amendment.” They talk about civil-rights workers who carried pistols and weren’t attacked by the Ku Klux Klan. But black people without pistols were harassed. This proves that people should be allowed to carry pistols.
Response: Wow, Hoffman, I am impressed you were capable of sitting through an entire DVD and being able to glean a simplistic argument based on anecdotal evidence. Congratulations. Nevermind the reams of statistics that show that the overall proliferation of guns leads to an overall increase in gun crime. That’s just boring statistics, right? Anecdotes from 40 years ago are so much more compelling.
(3) Hoffman: The murder of professors on the UA Nursing campus would not have happened if people in class were toting guns.
Response: What an ugly f—ing trivialization of a local tragedy. This is totally heinous-ass smarmy bullsh*t. I can’t believe the ediors gave this idiotic, amateurish piece of student-level writing a pass. The argument that “the deaths of the people at the UA College of Nursing never would have happened if the school were not a gun-free zone” is the sort of lame-brained crap you’d expect to see trolls writing in the message boards of the AZ Starnet. There’s not even a real argument behind it, just speculation based on a personal bias. There is no evidence whatsoever that people who are out to kill people and then commit suicide are any less likely to do so if they think there might be others around who have guns. It’s pure conjecture. Plus the very idea of students having free reign to carry concealed weapons assumes that there are actually students or faculty who *want* to carry concealed weapons, which I guarantee you 99% of them do not. There’s also the very real possibility of people who carry concealed weapons using those weapons inappropriately when angered or put in an emotionally charged situation or conflict, or having their weapons stolen. Hoffman doesn’t address the problems that could occur from having guns in dormitories and other community environments where they can very easily come out of the control of the owners. Who is this Jonathan Hoffman twit, anyway? Since when does the Tucson Weekly employ writers with their heads this far up their asses?
(4) Hoffman: “Should we not ask the same state government that owns the university, and issues concealed-carry permits, to trust its own judgment? The only downside that I see is that universities could expand the permit requirement to other rights, like free speech and free practice of religion.”
Response: Huh? If universities allow concealed-gun permits, the downside is they might require permits for free speech? Did somebody hit Jonathan Hoffman in the head with a copy of the Constitution? This sentence doesn’t even make any f—ing sense.
(5) Hoffman: “(By the way, I love the acronym “SCOTUS,” because it sounds like a disease of the nether regions.)”
Response: Are the editors asleep at the tiller for the holidays? You actually left this retarded parenthetical statement in the same editorial that discusses the tragic murder of 3 UA professors? One second the guy’s talking about people who were recently killed, and the next second the guy’s making a joke about venereal diseases? WTF? Jonathan Hoffman is not the only one who f—ed up here. This piece never should have run in the Tucson Weekly. What a shameful goddamn embarrassment.
(6) Hoffman: “Washington, D.C., has a virtual ban on all functioning privately held firearms. It is also the murder capital of the country … coincidence?”
Response: Hoffman’s stats are wrong here. Editors? Do you always let writers spew stats at random without compelling them to cite their sources? What – the – hell???
• According to this Infoplease page, with crime stats from 2006, Wash D.C. ranks 19th in the country, with the top 3 most violent cities being Detroit, St. Louis and Flint Michigan:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0921299.html
• According to this Wikipedia entry Wash D.C. violence has been in decline since the early 1990s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C.
Jonathan Hoffman is not just slightly factually wrong — he’s completely off. Hoffman has essentially made up a statistic to suit his argument. This piece doesn’t even display a BASELINE LEVEL of journalistic standards. Utterly, completely shameful. This piece is the opposite of professional and should never have seen ink.
(7) Hoffman: “In the meantime, a mentally ill man earlier this month entered a “gun-free” shopping mall–where even the security guards were unarmed–and murdered as many people as he liked before he killed himself. A week or so later, a man who apparently intended mass murder (four guns and hundreds of rounds) entered a church, killed two people and then–oops! An armed security guard stopped the attack, and dozens of lives were saved. No “gun-free zone” there.”
Response: Actually Hoffman just negated his own argument. One location was “gun-free,” the other location was not “gun-free” — and yet the same number of people died.
Let me just reiterate that I am completely flummuxed as to why the Tucson Weekly would run with this garbage. What has happened to this paper? Where are your standards?
Sam,wouldn’t it be more interesting to discuss sushi and your skills as a caterpillar roll maker?
What, are we not allowed to print viewpoints with which we disagree? Sheesh, DBB. Write a letter to the editor!
Double Barrelled Ballistics:
“Let me just reiterate that I am completely flummuxed as to why the Tucson Weekly would run with this garbage … Where are your standards?”
By “standards,” you mean only those that you agree to, it sounds.
As for your offense at the use of the UA shootings as an example, I’ll go you one further.
It’s a sad, scary day when a guy carrying two pistols – one a .22 can-pinger – can open fire, stop, reload, and only one person tries to stop him.
If this society were more comfortable with guns instead of going a little apeshit every time they see the word, maybe somebody would have returned fire.
Did everybody miss the first line of my comments where I said “I don’t object to a sober and well-reasoned editorial that takes a stance I disagree with.”?
The problem with the piece is that its arguments were poor and its facts were worse.
If you write an article where you claim Washington D.C. has the worst crime rate in the country, when in fact it is 19th, then you’ve screwed up bigtime.
The top 3 most violent cities are St. Louis, Detroit and Flint. I guarantee you all of those cities have a widespread proliferation of guns.
Again, my problem isn’t that I disagree with the politics of the piece. My problem is that the writing is poor. The arguments and style would barely pass muster at the Arizona Daily Wildcat.
Heck, publish all the contrarian editorials you want. But make sure the writers are good. This is like if you published an anti-gay editorial and the writer wrote “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” while citing a made-up statistic that gay people are more likely to molest children. I am sure you would apply editorial judgment in such a case and require the writer to offer something better. Yet in this case, the writer pulls a blatantly false statistic out of his ass and nobody even questions it.
Disappointing.
Ugh. Now that I’ve been a big jerk and vented, I feel kind of guilty. Sorry if my posts were over-the-top.
Had that article been politically opposite, but still as poorly executed as it is, I still would have been critical of it, though probably not quite so jerky.
The rest of the issue has a lot of high points. The cover story is a great read. The headlines are as funny as the text (note: the HTML is messed up mid-way through, though it is probably helpful for your nearsighted readers).
Danehy’s piece is pretty funny. It’s amusing to read the top 3 movies from a guy who only saw about 5 films. His line calling a protester a “little bitch” was humorous.
The DVD reviewer’s comments on “Jackass 2.5” are strange. Apparently scenes of people vomiting and putting things in their butt are OK with him, but fecal scenes are not. Interesting place to draw the line.
Anyway….I think I’ll go out and get drunk tonight.
Telling and chilling how China eventually got fascism right. “Why, there’s lead in our toys, how could you do that to us!” (St. Louis, Detroit and Flint, among other places, being pockets of unemployment, poverty, anomie, lead ‘n stuff)
I didn’t get a chance to respond to Michael earlier, so here goes:
“If this society were more comfortable with guns instead of going a little apeshit every time they see the word, maybe somebody would have returned fire.”
If you’re really comfortable second-guessing people in a traumatic situation, go for it. You weren’t there, but apparently you feel completely comfortable judging the behavior of people while somebody was shooting a gun at them. Nice armchair analsysis there.
The whole “if only somebody in that classroom had a gun, nobody would have died” argument is absurd. Let’s say you were a pistol-packing student with a weapon concealed in your backpack. In the time it would take you to unzip your backpack, remove the gun from its pouch, flick off the safety and then aim and shoot, at least two people would already be dead. You might stop the assailant, you might not. If you did, then hooray for you. The odds of being in a classroom where some insane jackass suddenly waltzes in and starts shooting up the place are about 1 in 3,000,000 or so, so you will have won the Hero Lottery (that is, if you can retrieve your gun and aim it in time to be remotely helpful).
While you’re at it, you could also carry an asthma inhaler everywhere you go in case some poor soul has an ashtma attack, so you can be there to save the day. Also carry around an insulin kit for emergency diabetic needs, a snakebite kit in case somebody is attacked by a rattler while trying to avoid a spider, wear a bullet-proof vest in case of a tower sniper with a brain tumor pressing his adrenal gland (ala the University of Texas gunman), a groin cup in case a wild pit bull runs up and bites you in the ‘nads, and two gallons of water in each fist in case Y2K happens after all. You can prepare for everything and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be the Big Hero who stops the Freak Occurrance.
Because let’s face it, if only one of those nursing students kept a loaded pistol handy in between learning to find veins and take blood-pressure readings, nobody would have been hurt. As we all know, in Tucson, Arizona it’s very easy to conceal a weapon while walking around in sandals, short-shorts and a monogrammed tank-top shirt. No problem: Just cut a section out of one of your $120 student textbooks and hide your gun in there. It’s not like those things have much resale value, what with the way they keep releasing new editions that render the previous ones obsolete.
Of course, clearly I am going “apeshit” at the very mention of the word “gun” here. Ouch, I just said it. “Gun” — ouch, I just said it again. I can’t stand that word! It’s like “moist” times four! Gun, gun, gun, gun…..ohhhh the pain.
Maybe you’re all right. If everybody were walking around the UA campus packing heat, nobody would ever shoot a gun at all. The deterrent would be so strong, it would be the most peaceful campus ever. We all know that students just out of high-school are the most level-headed, responsible group imaginable, and these upstanding young men and women could be trusted to always handle firearms with remarkable levels of care and respect.
Incidentally, I was wrong about St. Louis being the most dangerous city in the U.S. That was the case in 2006, but in 2007 Detroit made a comeback. (“Old Detroit has a cancer….that cancer is crime.”)
But I realize now Jonathan Hoffman was talking about the “Murder Capital” of the U.S., which I suppose a little different. By that measure, Washington D.C. still does not hold the title. Note that no reputable institution reports on which city is the Murder Capital. That term is primarily used by pro-gun groups in reference to cities with strict gun legislation. It’s not a measure of total gun deaths but of gun deaths per capita. After a few Google searches, it would seem that Washington D.C. merited the honor of “Murder Capital” around 1998 (when the term seems to have first been coined in relation to the city). The murder rate has dropped significantly since then. Cities that have been called Murder Capitals since then include Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and most recently, New Orleans.
The recent title for “Murder Capital” of the world, of course, would easily go to Baghdad.
So Jonathan Hoffman’s offhanded stat is sloppy, meaningless and incorrect no matter how you look at it. But it gets worse: It turns out that one of Hoffman’s primary sources, the book “More Guns, Less Crime” by John Lott has been determined to be based on a survey that Lott made up. (When publically challenged to prove his survey was real, not a single survey subject came forward but one — a prominent pro-gun advocate and acquaintance of Lott’s.) Worse yet, when criticized online, Lott was notoriously caught impersonating a female student who repeatedly rose to his defense. I had heard about this a few years ago and didn’t realize it was the same guy.
So basically, Jonathan Hoffman’s op-ed in the Tucson Weekly is largely based on the defamed dillweed for whom the pejorative internet term “sock puppet” was coined.
Again, I am all for a variety of opinions and arguments in the pages of the Tucson Weekly. But when you print the half-assed, poorly researched ramblings of a lowlife like Jonathan Hoffman, you are insulting your audience. There’s no point in editors taking on a bunker mentality to protect a writer well after the writer has been exposed as an unprofessional half-wit.
It is even more offensive and insulting when that writer uses a local tragedy as a primary touchstone for his argument, second-guessing the actions of those who suffered through the ordeal. It adds insult to injury when the writer glibly switches tone within two graphs to make an unfunny, non-sequitur, frat-boy-mentality joke about a word sounding like a venereal disease. It’s just lazy editing all around and Tucson readers deserve better. Sorry, but it’s true.
Oh by the way: Sorry again. I don’t know why this sort of thing makes me so angry. I guess it’s because the lazy thinking of this writer reminds me of the overall lazy thinking of the population, who allowed George Bush to retain power in 2004 and who are so easily led and swayed by faulty, manipulative, audience-abusive rhetoric even after being fooled again and again and again. I also probably wouldn’t get this angry if I didn’t like the Tucson Weekly so much, because I most certainly don’t want to associate the Tucson Weekly with that low level of discourse and hate to see such idiocy creep into its pages (even under the guise of “offering an alternative viewpoint”).
Now to commence the evening’s ritual of binge drinking.
“You might stop the assailant, you might not. If you did, then hooray for you. ”
Explain the math of 2 dead versus 25 dead because nobody was armed — that’s the tricky thing. I understand the basic arguments coming from the Students for Concealed Weapons group. I’m unsure about the validity of the arguments, but to me here are the positives and negatives of widespread gun ownership:
Positive – Everybody has a gun. It becomes like the Cold War: are you gonna shoot knowing full well you likely will go to jail if it wasn’t appropriate? As well knowing the other person can shoot back?
Negative – Everybody has a gun. Not everybody is sane enough to own one safely. Hmmmmm. Also, if everybody has guns, then someone barred from having a gun is more likely to either A) want one and steal it or B) go wacky (which in turn becomes “gets shot”)
Gun ownership is a tricky societal question. I would even call it more societal than ethical. However, do you not see any areas where you can “see the other side” regarding this debate ?
Also, what are your thoughts of taser ownership versus gun ownership? Some of the same arguments apply, but there are different variables. (If you shoot someone, you know they’re going to die — when it comes to tasering someone, the psychological limitation of doing so is less because you think “well it won’t be fatal, so it’s somehow ‘more okay’ “.)
Here’s a nice POV of taser use on a Polish immigrant killed at the Vancouver, B.C. airport last November
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VqdUhotL6Fw
True, Mari – I’ve read about that before and it is a sad, sad story. I mean, the guy was just visiting his mother and got into a misunderstanding at the airport that ended in his death by tasering by the Airport Po-Po. (“Airport Po-Po” ?? wha?)
Taser ownership is tricky. With guns, we have a connection: “bullets -> dead guy”. With a taser, we merely think “taser -> temporarily incapacitated guy” — in a sense of, ‘oh that guy will stop twitching later’. However, there are a lot of examples where taser does equal fatality, and I’m not sure that equation is prevalent for taser advocates.
I want to know more on how the taser works for people with weak hearts, or weak lungs. When a taser is used to take someone down, nobody asks “hey bro do you have a Pacemaker I should be aware of?” beforehand.
and I’m not sure that equation is prevalent ^in the minds of taser advocates.
IPH: “Explain the math of 2 dead versus 25 dead because nobody was armed — that’s the tricky thing.”
Which math are you using? The examples given in the article were the Colorado church shootings and the UA Nursing School shootings. Each case had 2 – 4 people die, but in one example others had guns. If these two examples were meant to contrast with each other then they were poorly chosen examples. Nowhere did the author mention the Columbine or Virginia Tech shootings, which might have made a better contrast (although the author would have a hard time arguing that Columbine students should have been toting guns).
I could easily see the other side of this debate if it were coming from somebody who wrote about it intelligently. You seem to be an example. Jonathan Hoffman is not such a person — he didn’t even do his journalistic due diligence on one of his primary sources, after all.
We are all at risk for dying from a crazy, random event at any moment. Let’s hope none of us does. We could be shot up in a Furr’s Cafeteria or McDonald’s. We could be shot in a mall, or while pumping gas in Washington D.C. (note: more guns does not mean less crime when the criminal is a long-distance sniper). We could die in a head-on collision with some asshat who’s drunk and goes the wrong way down a freeway turnoff.
If you carry a concealed weapon, chances are very high that you will never have any reason to use it. We can encourage people to carry them anyway, and of course we’d want to encourage them all to have extensive gun education, training, and psychological evaluation. Who would benefit from all this? The gun manufacturers and trainers.
Does the public really benefit by having more people with guns? You can point to any number of burglaries where the homeowner has used a gun to defend against an intruder. In turn, I can point to the recent Miami Dolphins player who was shot by an intruder in spite of his ownership of guns, as well as the man in the Midwest from a few years ago who shot and killed a Vietnamese teenager on his doorstep who was confused about the address. (If I had time I would link to each of these stories, but they are easy to look up on Google.) There are also countless stories of road rage incidents turned gruesome because somebody had a gun in his glove box for emergencies. When your adrenalin is pumping, sometimes somebody cutting you off in traffic can be misconstrued as an “emergency.”
I do think there is a possible upside to having trained concealed-weapons owners here and there. I don’t see why selected UA teachers and administrators couldn’t be allowed to carry concealed weapons for emergencies — provided they were trained and screened. Or the UA could simply have a better security and police detail. The Virginia Tech shooting was more a failure of psychological screening than of a lack of guns, since the shooter should never have been allowed back on campus after turning in English essay assignments full of pointless, inchoate hostility and murder.
If you are ever in a conflict situation in which the antagonist has a gun, 9 times out of 10 your best option will be to run away. Even if you’re a terrific shot, and use an expert side-stance, have perfect aim, etc., the antagonist still has the element of the surprise and the will to kill. Most gun criminals are desperate people, addicts, gang idiots, or otherwise disturbed. You don’t really want to find out if you’re a better shot than they are — you just want to get away from them.
Though it doesn’t relate directly to this issue of the Tucson Weekly, here are some recent news stories that you should check out:
• China’s spies have infiltrated U.S. translation contractors: It stands to reason that the nation that owns most of the U.S.’s debt, and has the largest standing army, with the fastest-growing demand for oil resources, and the most stake in current Middle East conflicts, would have spies deeply infiltrating U.S. establishments. This is one such story.
• Lakota group pushes for new nation: Led by Russell Means, this American Indian group is trying to create its own nation inside the U.S.! Lakota would comprise large areas of South Dakota, Nebraska and other nearby states — check out this map. It would be like Lesotho in South Africa. Could this happen in Southern Arizona? (Tohono O’odhamia?)
• Home foreclosures in Pima County are on the rise. What else is new.
Dear Double-Barrelled Ballistics,
Glad you found it so titillating.
Double-Barrel: Sit down, get back on your meds and take a deep breath. Everything will be fine…honest.
DD