I found this testimony to the U.S. Senate by Dr. Daniel Webster, a public health professor, from a few weeks back – he claims that Missouri’s repeal of its permit-to-purchase law (which required police approval of all firearms purchases) increased murder rates. His testimony claims that the increase was directly tied to the repeal of the law:

In 2008, the first full year after the permit-to-purchase licensing law was repealed, the age-adjusted firearm homicide rate in Missouri increased sharply to 6.23 per 100,000 population, a 34 percent increase.

That is a pretty startling increase, but several aspects of the claim made me start sniffing the air for fertilizer.

First of all, notice that this claim includes only firearms homicides. People stabbed to death don’t matter? It turns out that while Missouri’s murder rates (from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports) did indeed rise from 2007 to 2008, it was a 24% increase, which while still disturbing, is not as disturbing as 34%....

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in History and Humanities from Stanford and has held fellowships from the Danforth, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His 2010 book Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition explores Obama’s political philosophy and commitment to democratic deliberation.

The election of 2012 is behind us. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have completed their last campaigns and given their final victory and concession speeches.

It is time to reflect on the persistent themes that characterized the campaign and locate the election in relation to the parties’ trajectories in recent years. Identifying those themes might explain, better than pundits’ fascination with demography or with politics as a game of imagery and maneuver, the reasons why the president was reelected by a larger margin than many analysts predicted.

It is not the atmospherics of their campaigns, but the substance of Obama’s and Romney’s stated goals and programs, the ideals they championed and the directions in which they wanted to take the nation, that reveal why the president’s message resonated with a majority of American voters. The candidates and their parties presented two competing and ultimately incompatible visions of America that have deep roots in our nation’s history. Most Republicans distrust government, particularly the federal government, and put their faith in free enterprise. Most Democrats, as they have done for a century, consider government regulation of the economy necessary to protect the most vulnerable Americans.

Although campaign observers warned repeatedly during the months preceding the election that they did not sense the energy or the commitment of Democratic voters that they found so striking in 2008, members of many groups – including ethnic and racial minorities, unmarried women, poor people, and Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants – ended up turning out in large numbers and voting for Obama by equally large or even larger majorities this time.^(a) Why?...

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Bring up Iraq — and expect to end up in an argument. Conservatives are no different from liberals in rehashing the unpopular war, which has become a sort of whipping boy for all our subsequent problems.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently enumerated countless pathologies that followed Iraq. Yet to examine her list is to learn just how misinformed we have become in our anguish over the intervention.

Noonan writes of Republicans: “It [Iraq] ruined the party’s hard-earned reputation for foreign-affairs probity. They started a war and didn’t win it.”

We can argue over whether the result of the war was worth the cost. But by January 2009, the enemy was defeated. There was a consensual government in Iraq, there were few monthly American casualties, and there was a plan to leave a small constabulary force to ensure stability and the sanctity of Iraqi borders and airspace....

Jill Lepore, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005.

On November 13, 2001, George W. Bush, acting as President and Commander-in-Chief, signed a military order concerning the “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism.” Under its provisions, suspected terrorists who are not citizens of the United States were to be “detained at an appropriate location designated by the Secretary of Defense.” If brought to trial, they were to be tried and sentenced by a military commission. No member of the commission need be a lawyer. The ordinary rules of military law would not apply. Nor would the laws of war. Nor, in any conventional sense, would the laws of the United States. In the language of the order, “It is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly said when he read an early draft, in which members of the commissions, as well as attorneys for both the prosecution and the defense, were to be selected by the Secretary of Defense. As Jess Bravin, the Wall Street Journal’s Supreme Court correspondent, reports in “The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantánamo Bay,” Ashcroft expected the prosecution of people involved in 9/11 to be handled criminally, by his department, as had been done, successfully, with earlier terrorism cases. Other senior advisers had not been consulted. Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell learned that Bush had signed the order only when they saw the news reported on television. In the final draft, the Department of Justice was left out altogether. Suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without charge, denied knowledge of the evidence against them, and, if tried, sentenced by courts following no previously established rules....

Sergey Radchenko is a lecturer at the University of Nottingham, based at the University's China campus in Ningbo, China. He is the author of Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-67 and the forthcoming Unwanted Visionaries: Soviet Failure in Asia at the end of the Cold War. Original declassified documents for this article are provided through the Digital Archive of the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center.

In December 1949, Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow, for his first trip abroad. Three months earlier, perched high above a crowd of thousands in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Mao had announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. The nascent country was yet unformed, and Mao thought it important to ensure that New China would stand on the right side of history: the Communist side. In this, Mao needed Joseph Stalin's blessing and Soviet help.

Back then, China was in ruins after years of war, first with Japan, then with itself: it had little industry and infrastructure, even less science and technology; it had no navy, no air force but unspeakable poverty and rampant disease. Russia, though still recovering from wartime losses, had a modern industry, atomic weapons, and the ambitions of a superpower.

Mao wanted a treaty of alliance that would give China "face" on the international stage but also provide security guarantees against the United States, economic aid to rebuild and modernize the ruined Chinese economy, and military assistance to "liberate" Taiwan. According to Mao's interpreter, present at the meeting, he told Stalin he wanted something that "looked good but also tasted delicious." Stalin was non-committal. He feared that closer relations with Mao could jeopardize Moscow's postwar gains in the Far East and quite possibly lead to a U.S. intervention.

After the opening of the Russian archives in the early 1990s, the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (CWIHP) obtained declassified documents on the meetings between Mao and Stalin, publishing them in translation, with scholarly commentary, in successive issues of the CWIHP Bulletin to shed light, for the first time, on the making of the Sino-Soviet Alliance. Not all documents were declassified, and key evidence remains locked away in inaccessible archival vaults in Moscow as well as Beijing. This week, CWIHP has published additional documents on the Mao-Stalin cat-and-mouse game, and on the ups and downs of Sino-Soviet relations in the following years. These documents offer an interesting look behind the curtains of foreign policy decision making in China and Russia and provide clues for understanding where the Sino-Russian relationship is headed today....

Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland" and several other books.

I’ve just learned the former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis died this morning at the age of 85. Among the ornaments to his career were two Pulitzer Prizes and two celebrated books on constitutional law. One, Gideon’s Trumpet, was about the Supreme Court case that established indigent criminal defendants’ right to an attorney, the other, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, concerned the decision that made it difficult for targets to harass journalists by suing for libel. The Times itself focuses on how he revolutionized coverage of the Supreme Court. I’ll let others talk about that. Me, I’ll focus on a product of the kind of work I do as a historian of the 1960s and ’70s. In my research, I endeavor to assemble massive piles of the kind of arguments ordinary Americans might encounter about current events in the course of a day, the better to reconstruct how public opinion is formed and deformed. As such, it’s pretty easy for me to put together a fairly representative sample of what the most prominent media voices were saying during those years. That’s what I’ve just done now. And what I’ve found is a stunning record of Anthony Lewis’s consistent astringent vision and moral courage when it came to executive power and the national security state—a willingness ещ record the ugliest things the American state was up to, and to unflinchingly interpret them not as the exceptions of a nation that is fundamentally innocent but as part of a pattern of power-drunk arrogance. Think of Noam Chomsky on the op-ed page, several times a week....

Steven Conn, editor of To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press USA/2012), is professor and director of Public History at Ohio State University.

Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in 1980 with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. It's worth remembering, especially in light of several recent events, why that was so important.

Philadelphia was a small sleepy town like dozens of others in the South, brutally segregated according to Mississippi law and customs, just like dozens of others. It became nationally famous -- and symbolic -- when three civil rights workers doing advance work for Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 were murdered by some of the local white supremacists. They instantly became martyrs to a heroic cause.

Sixteen years later, candidate Reagan didn't mention James Cheney, Andrew Goodman or Michael Schwerner in his speech. Instead, Reagan announced: "I believe in states' rights," and he promised the all-white Mississippi crowd that he would "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them."

Commentators then and now saw this as a shameless race-baiting appeal to white Southern voters. It surely was, and it foreshadowed the contempt President Reagan would have for civil rights and for black America altogether. But the racially divisive aspect of his speech has not proved to be its most important legacy.

One half of the Reagan revolution was economic: a set of policies -- called "supply side" or "trickle down" -- which proved remarkably successful at shifting income and wealth from the middle class to the already wealthy and increasing the national debt by a whopping 180 percent. They failed, of course, to deliver on the promise of balanced budgets and widely-spread prosperity.

The other half, however, was built into that rallying cry for "states' rights." With it, Reagan hoped to move the consideration of a whole host of social issues out of Washington and back to the 50 state capitals. In this, he was also remarkably successful.

Calling for "states' rights" is a venerable tradition in American politics. The founders, its enthusiasts insist, established our system of federalism giving the states broad powers in order to protect citizens from the threat of an over-bearing central government. That's what the 10th amendment is all about.

At a more logistical level, in a sparsely populated but geographically far-flung new nation, empowered state governments were better positioned to respond to the needs and demands of citizens. Democracy brought closer to the people.

That second rationale has largely disappeared with modernization and technology. Our economy is no longer local, but rather connected to national (and international) networks and systems; we communicate instantly with people from coast to coast and everywhere in between, and we are a highly mobile society of people moving frequently from one state to another. And yet each time we do so, we have to go to another DMV office and stand in another line in order to be cleared to drive the car that brought you to this state. The logistics of states' rights have perhaps outlived their usefulness.

That first rationale, however, deserves our skepticism just as much. States' rights masquerades as high constitutional principle when in effect it has largely been a political tactic invoked when particular vested interests feel threatened by the tide of history. This was certainly the case for the Southern segregationists in the 1950s and '60s who justified their creation and support of American apartheid by calling it states' rights. A generation earlier, Southern politicians held much of FDR's New Deal hostage unless he promised to give them local control over federal money. This way they could keep African Americans from benefiting from New Deal programs. Call it situational states' rights.

And 150 years ago, the ancestors of those same Southerners seceded from the Union and precipitated the Civil War. Make no mistake about it: the North did not go to war to end slavery, at least not initially, but the South fought that war to defend their "sacred institution." And they called it a defense of the principle of "states' rights."

Since Reagan revived the states' rights rebel yell, it has been used first and foremost as a rationale to deny women access to abortion and family planning more broadly. A series of Supreme Court decisions beginning in the mid-1960s and culminating with Roe v. Wade took the right to regulate our sexuality away from the states. With Ronald Reagan's ascension, conservative state legislatures took it back. Which brings us most recently to Little Rock, Arkansas, where a troglodytic Republican state legislature just overturned Governor Mike Bebee's veto of yet another draconian restriction on abortion.

Likewise, the basic rights and protections of gay Americans have been cast as a "states' rights" issue, thus saddling us with the bizarre and untenable set of laws we have now. A gay couple married in New York, say, will not have that marriage recognized -- and all that comes with that recognition -- in, say, Ohio, which passed an amendment banning same-sex marriage in 2004.

Nor are we ever going to have a sensible national approach to gun control when we are forced to have 50 different approaches to guns. Colorado can pass a set of perfectly reasonable gun restrictions even while South Dakota passes a law arming employees in public schools.

Back at the Supreme Court, right-wing justices seem poised to overturn key aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act essentially because they feel it is an insult to "states' rights" -- they hinted that perhaps the law had served its purpose and now only constitutes an onerous burden placed on states by the federal government. Supporters of the Act have pointed to all kinds of ways in which voting rights in those places still need to be protected.

No one, apparently, asked this question: why on earth should the right to vote -- the basic right of our national citizenship -- differ from state to state? What justifies 50 different versions of access to the voting booth?

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that our current system of federalism is an 18th century anachronism at best, at worst a constitutional ploy that has historically enabled the majority to tyrannize minorities, the powerful to impose their will on others. When you hear politicians or judges blow the states' rights trumpet, something retrograde is probably going to happen.

Melissa Weininger is a scholar of modern Jewish Studies. She received her Ph.D. in 2010, and has taught at The University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Rice University.

Last week the New York Times and the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that President Obama will not go to the Western Wall when he visits Israel next week.

An official who spoke to the Times framed this lacuna in the president’s itinerary as a security issue, explaining that the difficulty of protecting the president near the site was too great. And other presidents, including Bill Clinton in 1996, have not visited the Wall either. In general there has been little response, positive or negative, to the news that the president would not go to the Wall. But Americans and Israelis concerned with civil rights in Israel should be applauding the news, because there are many good reasons why President Obama should not visit the Western Wall.

The New York Times quoted Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren as saying, “Everything on the Seder table—from the lamb shank to the parsley to the egg—is rife with symbolism. So, too, with every item on the president’s itinerary.”...

Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor to The Nation.

Greg Valentini is a homeless vet in Los Angeles who took part in the initial invasion of Afghanistan and participated in the assault on Tora Bora that sought Osama bin Laden. He’s also a plaintiff in the class action suit brought by the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU-SC) arguing that the VA has “misused large portions of its West Los Angeles campus and failed to provide adequate housing and treatment for the people it was intended to serve.” (See my Nation article “LA’s Homeless Vets.”) Valentini was a private in the 101st Airborne, and the lawsuit describes his service in Afghanistan: “He took part in significant ground fighting, under nearly constant sniper fire and mortar bombardment” and “witnessed the gruesome deaths of numerous civilians, including children.” He was redeployed to Iraq, where he again experienced heavy combat. He received six decorations for his service.

Steve Lopez, the legendary Los Angeles Times columnist, has been following Valentini. When he came back from Afghanistan, Lopez wrote, Valentini “ended up in post-combat hell, living in a tent by the Long Beach Airport, bathing in a lake and eating out of garbage cans.” He “doesn’t enjoy reviewing the harrowing details of his combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and his later descent into suicidal fantasies, homelessness and drug addiction.” He also told Lopez “I don’t want to be a whiny vet.” He “blames the bulk of his problems on himself, rather than the VA.” But he does think it would help other homeless vets who have severe emotional problems if they could live in the VA dorms on its Brentwood campus in West L.A.

The problem is that the land, donated 125 years ago for housing disabled veterans, today houses nobody. That’s why the ACLU-SC is suing the VA. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of the ACLU-SC Foundation.) Veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, WWI and WWII lived there for decades. But since the 1970s, the dormitories have been empty, and the VA has rented parts of the site to a Rent-a-Car company and a hotel laundry, along with a neighboring private school and UCLA, which use the land for athletic fields. Meanwhile homeless veterans sleep on the street outside the locked gates....