Monthly Archives: September 2011

Whiskey Tango Florida

by Diana Wueger Posted on September 19, 2011

Florida’s gun laws were in the news again last week, and despite my failure to open my various small arms Google alerts at all this month, they somehow caught my attention. My legal training is limited to a single day of Con Law in undergrad, but I find these fights over gun rights vs gun control fascinating and often absurd, so let’s have a look.

I have no idea where this came from, but I can't stop laughing.

First up is a recent federal ruling preventing Florida from enforcing a new law that bans doctors from talking about gun safety with their patients. Apparently some doctors refused to provide service to some patients who refused to disclose whether they owned firearms. Enter legislation! Per The Miami Herald:

The firearm law didn’t prohibit doctors outright from asking about guns; it said they should refrain from inquiring about firearm ownership unless there’s a compelling medical reason.

Many doctors don’t ask about firearms, but some pediatricians do – in addition to inquiring about pools and drugs in the home. But some Medicaid patients in the Panhandle and in Ocala complained that the questions about guns infringed on their privacy, and they complained to lawmakers.

Originally, the legislation banned doctors from asking about firearms at all. But the National Rifle Association and the Florida Medical Association agreed on compromise legislation that said doctors “should” refrain from the line of questioning. The bill then passed the Legislature.

Pediatricians, though, continued to protest and then sued. They said the law was vague enough to expose doctors to nuisance complaints to the Department of Health.

Ostensibly, the state is just trying to protect firearm owners’ right to privacy, and they’re concerned about this information being recorded in patients’ charts. This is some of that absurdity I mentioned earlier, because:

a) there’s far more sensitive information in medical records than whether the patient owns a firearm, and health information is about as legally protected as information can be (hey there, HIPAA!), and

b) if they’re so concerned with consumer privacy writ large, why isn’t the state also preventing doctors from asking if patients about swimming pools? What if I don’t want to tell you, Doc? That’s my secret swimming pool. Where’s my Swimming Pool Owners’ Privacy Act, Florida?

There’s no reason that firearms owners should have any special protections from doctors’ oh-so-nosy questions, though it seems equally petty for doctors to deny service based on patients’ refusal to disclose that information. But maybe all those offended firearms owners could solve their own problems by being grown-ups and finding a new doctor, rather than turning it over for the making of political hay.

The very sensible U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke understands that, and issued an injunction preventing the state from enforcing the Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act on First Amendment grounds:

The law burdens doctors’ “ability to deliver a firearm safety message to patients” and “patients’ freedom to receive information about firearm safety,” Judge Cooke concluded. “The State has attempted to inveigle this Court to cast this matter as a Second Amendment case,” the judge wrote. “Despite the State’s insistence that the right to ‘keep arms’ is the primary constitutional right at issue in this litigation, a plain reading of the statute reveals that this law in no way affects such rights.”

You’d think that would be obvious, and yet, here we are. The governor’s office has issued a statement that they intend to appeal the block. How unexpected! A Tea Party Republican fighting valiantly for Second Amendment-ish rights against the mean old federal judge in a presidential election year in a battleground state! This is obviously not a Second Amendment case, but politicians know that gun rights groups and their supporters can be mobilized through those magic words. They doesn’t even have to win the appeal to make the party look good in the eyes of 2A voters - at least they tried, right?

I have more sympathy for the other new law, which is intended to do away with the patchwork of gun laws across Florida (to contextualize that, most states preempt local gun laws). In quick summary, Florida passed a law in 1987 that banned local governments from creating and enforcing their own gun laws. This 1987 law was broadly ignored, both by local and state government. Then in 2000, South Miami passed a law requiring trigger locks for guns while stored in contravention of Florida state law. The NRA took South Miami to court for violating the 1987 law and won, making it clear that the 1987 law could be used to override local laws in practice as well as in theory.

Now, the state legislature has passed a new law that “imposes fines on counties and municipalities that do not do away with and stop enforcing their own firearms and ammunition ordinances by Oct. 1.” And I get why that’d be appealing. I live in DC, my favorite range is in Maryland, and the guns owned by my friends live in Virginia - I haven’t been shooting in months, because it’s too much hassle to work it all out (though yes, I could just rent, I know). Transporting firearms across jurisdictions is a headache. Most gun owners really do want to be responsible and law-abiding, and it’d be nice if there was some consistency so as to make their lives easier.

And hey, the state is just enforcing a law that’s already in place. Can’t blame them for that. If Floridians want to go back to their patchwork of ordinances, they can vote in a new legislature that might rewrite that 1987 law. And maybe that wouldn’t be a terrible idea; even though the Supreme Court has upheld the individual right to bear arms, it’s still an open question of what is considered reasonable restrictions on their carry and use. Miami (pop 400k) might want different gun laws than Perry (pop 7k).

Nevertheless, the timing of this effort is interesting for the same reasons as above. Basically, a Tea Party-backed Republican state government has chosen RIGHT NOW to demonstrate their dedication to gun rights over local authority or sensible public health measures like telling people about gun safety. I’d bet the party is either looking for NRA money for the coming elections, or they’re galvanizing their base for said elections, or both. That they’re doing it at the expense of public safety shouldn’t be surprising, but it is, dare I say it, a little absurd.

Posted in War | 2 Comments

Courtney Messerschmidt Is Just a Beer Commercial

by Diana Wueger Posted on September 9, 2011

In case you missed it, ding dong Great Satan’s Girlfriend is… well, not dead, but outed. If you missed the brouhaha, here and here and here. Good timing, too, because after she linked to Caitlin’s excellent post about women in IR/FP/natsec and had the temerity to stick some random co-eds on top, I had just about had it with people holding her up as some vanguard for women in the field. The character of Courtney Messerschmidt was not some paragon of womankind; she was a pernicious element that can’t go away soon enough for my tastes.

To be clear, I’m not objecting to her ideas (what few I could glean through her mangling of the English language). I don’t agree with neoconservatism, but I do support free speech and freedom of conscience. Had she simply spouted gibberish without the photographic accompaniment, I wouldn’t have had quite as much of a problem.

No, I’m primarily outraged by her claim to be promoting women when she was very clearly doing the opposite. Not to go all Sociology 101 on you, but her choice of images belied her commitment to promoting women’s participation in these traditionally male-dominated fields. Her photos were generally of rumpled, possibly drunk, teen/20-something girls, often suggestively dressed, posing for the straight male gaze. Sometimes there was a militant element, but just as often these girls are in their Victoria Secret PINK best in a dorm room. This is what women in foreign policy are supposed to look like?

And I get that it’s a marketing ploy. It’s the same basic premise as a beer commercial – men like looking at women, men feel entitled to look at women, men pay more attention when women are half-dressed, and somebody somewhere benefits (though rarely the women being looked at). In the case of beer, the company makes sales, because men are the primary purchasers of beer. In the case of Courtney, she gets attention in a crowded marketplace of ideas, because men still dominate the field.

But unlike in the beer scenario, women were actively harmed by the Courtney character*. Courtney is a prime example of a patriarchal bargain at work. By sexualizing her intellectual output to draw in (male) readers, she was participating in a system in which women as a whole are disadvantaged in exchange for her personal gain. Once inside the in-crowd, she made noises about girl power without doing anything to dismantle the system that holds up the male view as the only one that matters. All gender is performance, but her performance of a specific form of femininity and the resultant attention she got for it disadvantages women who aren’t willing to take their clothes off to be heard. Most smart women realize that men will pay attention to you if they’re sexually attracted to you, but that that doesn’t equate to respect for your ideas. So most smart women keep their clothes on and struggle to be heard above the din in the normal ways.

Look, it’s not easy being pretty, young, and/or female in this field. I’m not claiming to be the second coming of Liz Taylor here, but I frequently question whether I’m being taken seriously because I’m talking sense or because I’m cute and charming. Are you reading this because I’ve got a great rack? Is my writing being promoted because I’m female, and therefore need that extra boost because well hey she’s trying but she’s just a girl, or because I’m legitimately good at this? I don’t want to be thought of as good for a girl; I want to be thought of as good period full stop. I don’t want to do better than I otherwise would strictly because I’ve got two X chromosomes.

If I were feeling charitable, I’d feel sorry for the real Courtney, tucked somewhere in this collective. She’s made some bad choices, dropping out of college, et al, and this probably seemed a good way to get some attention. But y’know, I’m just not feeling charitable. We’ve all had to fight to get where we are. There’s an older generation of women who had to fight more. To cheat your way past the real work of establishing yourself and building your legitimacy through the objectification of young women… nope. No charity. There is a level of self-centeredness and willful perniciousness on display in this little collective that takes my breath away.

I imagine there will be no consequences for her. I expect that she/they will still write for Wings Over Iraq and Line of Departure – free content posted constantly is hard to pass up - and I expect Tom Ricks will continue to venerate her as the voice of an up-and-coming generation. I also expect she/they will continue attaching photos of sexy ladies to titillate a male audience, who are clearly the only people who anybody would want to write for anyway [/sarcasm], because they don’t understand how harmful that is to the real women out there. So, y’know, thanks, Courtney. Thanks, anybody who publishes those photos. Thanks for continuing to legitimate the objectification of women. If you’re the future of foreign policy and national security, I want nothing to do with it.

* There’s an argument to be made that beer advertisements also harm women; see here, here, and here. Basically, read Sociological Images. It’s the best blog out there hands down.

Posted in Gender, Metablogging | 20 Comments

Amnesty, Cluster Munitions, and Gunfight

by Diana Wueger Posted on September 6, 2011

For UN Dispatch, I wrote about Amnesty International’s rather remarkable win last week:

Amnesty International won a remarkable victory last week when the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) agreed to end its dealings with companies known to produce cluster munitions. RBS is primarily taxpayer owned, and as a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), the United Kingdom is prohibited from investing in the direct production of cluster munitions, though not from investing in arms manufacturers more generally.

In mid-August, Amnesty International launched an intense campaign to pressure RBS to divest from cluster bomb manufacturers, arguing that the legal gap that permitted companies to invest in manufacturers as long as they did not directly invest in the production of cluster munitions violated the spirit of the cluster bomb treaty.

Pressuring a bank to change its behavior based on the spirit - not the legality, but the spirit - of an international treaty? Impressively done. Read the rest over here.

It’s a good thing I wrote this pre-Oklahoma, because my post-vacation ability to string words together is at an all-time low. I’ll have more on the evolving international law around cluster munitions later this week, when I can write again.

I also got my copy of Adam Winkler’s Gunfight, which I was plowing through on the plane. It’s fantastic and narrative-busting and I highly recommend you pick up a copy right now. I’ll have a review up as soon as I’m done, but really, you should just read it for yourself. It’s everything you never knew about the Second Amendment and America’s history with guns! What could be better?

Posted in GunsGunsGuns, Slightly Larger Arms | 2 Comments

When Elephants Fight, It is the Grass that Suffers

by Diana Wueger Posted on September 2, 2011

I’m about to hop on a plane for a long weekend in Oklahoma (go ahead, sing the song), but I wanted to draw your attention to a Telegraph article this morning about an 11-year-old boy who was killed by celebratory gunfire in Tripoli. Eleven years old. I don’t have words.

Of deeper concern, however, is paras 3-4:

Rebel officials are concerned about the sheer scale of weaponry in the country. A major in the Gaddafi army who went over to the rebels at the start of the uprising told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that there were already 15 million Kalashnikovs, Bereta machine guns and other light arms in Libya when he was running inventories – more than two for every man, woman and child.

As his regime crumbled, Col Gaddafi handed many of these out to citizens he thought were loyal, without keeping any records. In addition to all those are the many more brought in by rebels themselves, many supplied by Qatar, France and other members of the anti-Gaddafi coalition.

This isn’t going to be the last of these stories we’ll read. Revenge killing is almost assured, if the falling bullets don’t get there first.


Posted in War | 1 Comment