(cache) What Trump Doesn't Understand About British Gun Control

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

Adam Serwer

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

The Panic President

David A. Graham

Rarely does a leader in a liberal democracy embrace, let alone foment, fear. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump did in response to attacks in London, as he has often done before.

After a terrorist attack, there are two steps nearly every leader takes: first, condemn the violence; second, appeal for calm. London Mayor Sadiq Khan followed that familiar playbook in the wake of Saturday night’s attacks. Speaking to the BBC, Khan said:

There aren’t words to describe the grief and anger that our city is feeling today. I’m appalled and furious that these cowardly terrorists would deliberately target innocent Londoners and bystanders enjoying their Saturday night. There can be no justification for the acts of these terrorists, and I’m quite clear that we will never let them win, nor will we allow to cower our city.

Then Khan went on reassure the public:

Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. No reason to be alarmed. One of the things, the police, all of us need to do, is make sure we’re as safe as we possibly can be. I’m reassured that we are one of the safest global cities in the world, if not the safest global city in the world, but we always evolve and review ways to make sure that we remain as safe as we possibly can.

What Trump Doesn't Understand About Gun Control in Great Britain

David Frum

British policies have proved remarkably effective—a fact that Saturday’s attack underscores, rather than undermines.

Amid a flurry of other comments after the London attack, the president of the United States tweeted the following:

Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017

OK, so let’s talk about guns.

Here’s a picture of London’s Borough Market on a more typical day in 2011.

Here’s a scene of foot traffic on London Bridge leading to Borough Market.

On a pleasant summer evening, tens of thousands of Londoners walk through or enjoy themselves in the neighborhood the terrorists attacked. Three men armed with high-capacity firearms would not have killed seven and wounded 48: They would have killed hundreds or even more. British police could use their firepower advantage to kill the three terrorists in eight minutes. Had the terrorists been equally armed, who knows what the outcome of the gun battle might have been?

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Why Trump Criticized a London Under Attack

Peter Beinart

The president believes that globalism costs jobs and lives—and that what makes America exceptional is its resistance to global integration.

The narcissism generally comes first. Early Saturday evening, an hour after first retweeting a Drudge Report alert about the London terrorist attack, Donald Trump declared that, “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” In other words, London proves him right. Everything does. When Omar Mateen murdered 49 people at an Orlando nightclub last June, Trump tweeted, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.” That same month, when The Wall Street Journal reported that NATO was considering creating a new intelligence coordinator to assist in the fight against terrorism, Trump—who wasn’t even yet the Republican presidential nominee—explained, “It’s all because of me.”

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

The Republican Dilemma

Jay Caruso

GOP leaders are stuck trying to rein in Trump’s excesses without alienating their own primary voters, who are largely standing by their president.

CARTERSVILLE, Ga.—Several miles off Route 41 in Bartow County, Georgia, is the downtown area of Cartersville. It's a throwback place with brick-face storefronts, independently owned businesses, and railroad tracks that bring freight trains straight through the center of the town every 30 minutes.

Here, the firing of James Comey arouses not support or opposition, but rather, indifference. Nobody I spoke with cared either way; it doesn't affect them or their families. People shrugged when asked about Trump's tweetstorms. Most agreed that press treatment of Trump is too harsh. Overall, the focus for Trump voters here is the big picture: the economy, jobs, and border security.

Bartow County is 885 miles from Manhattan, but this is Donald Trump country. He took 46 percent of the vote here during the primary, trailed by Ted Cruz at 25 percent and Marco Rubio at 18 percent. In the general election, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton, winning 75 percent of the vote to Clinton's 21 percent.

How Populism Helped Wreck Venezuela

Uri Friedman

The story of how the country went from cheap fridges to no food is about more than socialism and corruption.

What’s the problem with populism? Why, in some circles, has the term acquired such a negative connotation? After all, you could argue that populism is simply the promotion of popular ideas with which elites disagree. You could think of it as a movement to uproot a political establishment that has become unresponsive to the public. But populism can also be described as a political logic by which politicians claim to exclusively represent the righteous people in a struggle against the corrupt elite. And the hazards of adhering to that logic are on display right now in Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez, the late leader of Venezuela’s socialist revolution, once provided his people with subsidized refrigerators from China, appearing on television in a mock kitchen to personally cross out the “capitalist” price tag on a fridge and write in a “Chavez discount.” Now his successor’s people have little to refrigerate. Three-fourths of Venezuelans reported involuntarily losing an average of 19 pounds in 2016 because of rampant food shortages and runaway inflation, which is making basic goods unaffordable. A third of Venezuelans reported eating two or fewer meals a day last year—triple the number recorded a year earlier. Child malnutrition has reached crisis levels.

Mother's Helper: A Shocking Thing I Learned After Giving Up My Eggs

Catherine Lacey

For $8,000 it was easy for the author to justify selling her eggs the first time. The second time, too. Only then did they share the bad news.

For $8,000 it was easy for the author to justify selling her eggs the first time. The second time, too. Only then did they share the bad news.

Aaron Amat/Shutterstock

A few years ago, a woman I've never met had my child, but that's not exactly true; she had our child, or something like our child. My DNA is fringed with her husband's DNA inside a baby who was carried and birthed by this anonymous woman.

Some couple has a kid that I am somehow scrunched inside of.

This was the winter of the Panicky Manhattanite. They scuttled around in Chanel coats, swiping at quarters on the sidewalk, whispering Madoff! while watching their IRAs and 401Ks and mutual funds implode on their phone's banking app, finally drowning their worries in $15 bottles of wine instead of over a nice dinner out, which now seemed, regrettably, indecent.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”