Of course the cops want the citizenry disarmed

The nanny-statists (i.e. progressives) love to crow about cops who support more restrictive gun laws. They see this as a fatal blow to the position of the law-and-order statists (i.e. conservatives) who try to pass themselves off as rugged individualists. Of course, the true individualists respond by saying "well duh, what did you expect". The question is whether the gun nuts will recognize that being a white male no longer makes them an authority, and that authoritarian statism is no longer in their own interests (if selling their souls was ever in their interests).

While the police and City Hall continue to blame lax state and federal gun laws, criminal justice advocates say that the problems in Chicago are more fundamental: The proliferation of poverty and lack of jobs.

Rage against the machine...

Are they talking about us, dear reader?

Clicking Their Way to Outrage (NYT)

A 2013 study, from Beihang University in Beijing, of Weibo, a Twitter-like site, found that anger is the emotion that spreads the most easily over social media. Joy came in a distant second. The main difference, said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, who studies anger, is that although we tend to share the happiness only of people we are close to, we are willing to join in the rage of strangers. As the study suggests, outrage is lavishly rewarded on social media, whether through supportive comments, retweets or Facebook likes. People prone to Internet outrage are looking for validation, Professor Martin said. “They want to hear that others share it,” he said, “because they feel they’re vindicated and a little less lonely and isolated in their belief.”