Left Flank

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Brendan Keefe confronts «Gun Nuttiness» in a very thoughtful post and comment here on LF.

If I really stretch, I can see an argument that says if I'm allowed to carry a gun everywhere else I go, why should I be hampered by having to check my gun when I go to school or work?

But really? No.

The latter seems a violation of the rights of private property -- a man's home is his castle and all that. More to the point, both ideas just seem to be asking for trouble. Despite the sturm und drang that explodes when guys like Seung-Hui Cho crack, I am unable to believe that any sane person thinks everyone else packing heat is the appropriate countermeasure to forestall future similar events. And when I consider how often tempers flare in class or the workplace … let's just say that I expect the body count to go up. Way up.

However, I agree with Adam L.:

Yea well property rights are so trampled on-- if you run a business you might as well consider it public property there's so many laws you have to follow-- that it's hardly surprising that one libertarian cause would trample another, in this case the sovereignty of the owner to do what he pleases with his property.

In the case of public property like public universities, I think this is probably not a very consequential idea. I highly doubt that there will be a massacre prevented by such legislation, but I doubt there will be a slew of gun-toting yahoos killing innocent lefty professors and students. People who get concealed carry (especially in states that don't have «shall issue» laws) tend to be pretty level-headed, responsible folks. It's possible that there may be some people who lose it, and their increased access to guns on campuses and government buildings will lead to a few DMV officials getting capped, but then again you might see a drop in crime in such areas.

Firstly, readers can review my concern with this issue on this page. I wanted Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to act on the legal loopholes regarding psychiatric procedures. He has accomplished that. However, the legislature left one symbolic loophole open, according to The Economist. The issue of how inordinately powerful interest groups become is one of my recurring nightmares.

Secondly, there was the issue of the university administration's negligence. Laura Collins points out what needs to be done on this count.

I support the 2nd Amendment, don't misunderstand me! Constitutional interpretations are a sideline in this issue. What matters is state law here, and proper regulation. And, how administrators, or leaders, do their job. Governor Kaine delivered, but the legislature and university administration still owe a debt.

The Economist takes aim at Virginia's «incomplete» gun law reforms one year after the Seung-hui Cho's rampage-çûm-suicide killed 32 innocent Virginia Tech college students and professors.

Virginia's rush to reform has been dramatic but incomplete. At the urging of the state's governor, Timothy Kaine, the legislature has funneled an extra $42m into mental-health treatment and staff. Virginia has also rewritten its laws for identifying and monitoring the mentally ill. One new law requires colleges to alert the parents of students who may be a danger to themselves or to others. And the state now requires mental-health questions on the instant-background checks for gun-buyers. These might have kept firearms out of Cho's hands.

Yet Virginia, though heavily suburban, is attached to its guns and the state can go only so far down this road. The legislature refused Mr Kaine's request to close a loophole in the firearms laws that allows purchases from unlicensed dealers at gun shows without an on-the-spot background investigation. This would have made no difference in Cho's case. But the proposed tightening was intended, at a minimum, to symbolise a strong response to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

The shootings, followed by the killing of five more students in February at Northern Illinois University, serve as a backdrop to the renewed debate over gun rights that is roiling the courts and the presidential campaign. The Supreme Court this year may strike down the handgun ban in Washington, DC, just across the Potomac river from Virginia. And in the run-up to the crucial Pennsylvania primary Barack Obama, the Democratic front-runner, has been pilloried for saying that small-town voters embrace guns (and God) because of their frustration over the economy.

Virginia has reached a legal settlement with most of the Virginia Tech survivors and the relatives of the dead. In return for promising not to sue the state, they will share $11m in compensation. Families of the victims will each be limited to $100,000, Virginia's statutory cap on damage claims against the state. Legislators are now wondering whether that ceiling, one of the lowest in the country, should be raised for the first time since 1993.

Although it remains difficult to sue the state to much effect, it is still easy for Virginians to carry guns. In fact, the Virginia Tech shootings have increased their popularity. In 2007 there was a 73% increase in concealed-handgun permit applications, according to the Virginia Supreme Court. That rise of more than 44,000 applications over the previous year was, gun-rights activists believe, a direct result of the bloodshed in Blacksburg.

But no freshman psychologizing about false consciousness here, because The Economist is talking about suburbanites? Let's ask Bruce Luedeman in Independence, Missouri:

How many would have survived had a mature, trained, adult in one of the Virginia Tech class rooms been armed and able to defend themselves and others?

The naive regulatory mistake of not allowing a trained concealed carry permit holder to carry into a college class room cost 33 lives. As I understand it Virginia Tech just settled with the families of the dead and injured for $11 million.

We need to develop an attitude of personal self defense in this country. I'm reminded of the old saying, «When seconds count the police are minutes away.»

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus is lobbying for concealed carry laws. «The beauty of concealed carry is that you don't have to carry to be protected by it,» Camoriano said. «So, just the element of uncertainty makes a lot of these would-be criminals change their minds and choose a different place to attack.»

Or, is it all just an act of a malevolent being?

Sadly, it will take one more massacre to find out if Virginia's legal reforms are sufficient.

Alexandra Marks at CSM treats to a potpourri of quotes, but generally favors private sector solutions to safeguarding privacy over.public ones.

Still, what can a concerned layperson do with the last quote:

«They pay a lot of attention to protecting that information, not because of consumer privacy, but because banks don't want to lose money: that's what's driving it, the big financial incentive,» says Avivah Litan, vice president of Gartner, a technology consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. «But with other information, like my passport file, what's the incentive to fix my privacy? There isn't one unless there's a consumer revolution and that doesn't look like [it's] coming.»

That is one of the things prompting the ACLU to continue to fight government efforts to collect even more data on individuals, including the REAL ID Act. That requires states to issue standard driver's licenses and give the federal government access to information about those licenses. Some government security experts want to combine those state files with the databases that DHS already keeps on Americans' international travel, the State Department's passport files, the Social Security's E-Verify database, and the FBI's criminal records. They argue that those combined files could then be mined to ferret out terrorists. But many privacy experts object, saying such information remains too vulnerable to attack.

«We believe the better way to ensure security is to do actual physical security checks, like screening all the bags that go in the belly of a plane and being sure weapons don't get on,» says Mr. Sparapani. «Instead we have all of these data sets that are being created and collected by the government and all of which are vulnerable to hacking and malicious attack and being stolen by identity thieves and terrorists.»

Other security experts note that mining such databases can be very helpful in identifying fraud or other patterns of criminal behavior. But they, too, are wary of the privacy implications.

«There really are good reasons for analysts to look at lots of phone records and call detail if you're putting it to the right use: You're not going to find needles in a haystack without a lot of data aggregation and data mining,» says Ms. Litan. «But we're always going to be behind the eight ball [on privacy], there's a ton of data on all of us out there and a lot of unauthorized abuse of it. I'm not really sure what the solution is.»

Hmmm...solution: take a side!

A novelist would be hard-pressed to top Chhun Yasith's story. Yet, beyond his humble beginnings in a Long Beach strip mall, and with California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher in his camp, still Chhun looks like a bit player in a larger campaign. It's just not democratization.

Some observers said the American government's aggressive pursuit of Mr. Chhun stands in marked contrast to the aborted investigation the FBI carried out into a 1997 incident in which grenades were thrown into an election rally, killing 16 people and injuring more than 100 others, including an American who formerly worked for the International Republican Institute. An initial FBI probe was all but abandoned after evidence pointed to bodyguards for Mr. Hun Sen.

"I find it extremely curious," Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch said. "They went after this ragtag bunch that was not in power and did not systematically commit human rights abuses for many years like Hun Sen has and they, for political reasons, dropped the investigation into the grenade attack which many think derailed any chance of a serious multi-party political system there."

Other analysts have described the charges against Mr. Chhun, who promoted a Cambodian rebellion openly from a Long Beach strip mall, as a quid pro quo for Cambodian help in rounding up members of a an Islamic terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiya.

I guess the Bush administration is signaling which project, democratization or GWOT, is more important.

Four disparate, yet coordinated groups of Chinese farmers in PRC have started a dialogue, as it were, about dissent. Activists in Beijing have recruited farmers and produced four similar manifestoes demanding private ownership of land, to safeguard their investments from speculators and other business interests assisted by the Communist Party, to accelerate urban development. FT's Jamil Anderlini's report cuts right to the central issue:

Some government scholars say a shortage of arable land in China would be exacerbated if peasants were allowed to sell at will to developers. But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing and argue that privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms. The power to reclassify rural land as industrial or urban lies with government officials, who derive much of their official revenues (not to mention illicit personal income) from selling reclassified land. While peasants do not have to pay for their 30-year leases, they are allowed to sublet their land, which provides huge scope for officials to grant government land for free to their friends and relatives, who then lease the land for a profit. Advocates of privatisation acknowledge that the majority of local officials across the country are unlikely to support the loss of such a large source of revenue and this entrenched interest is probably the biggest obstacle to the government agreeing to such a reform. «The big problem with our socialist system is that Communist party officials have become the landlords,» says one organiser of the protests, who argues that private land ownership will be a precursor to a more pluralistic political system.

Yet, there is a need to consider the mode and value of dissent, especially when foreigners voice it, as has occurred with the issue of the Beijing Olympics. Both Jeremiah Jenne and Gordon G. Chang represent two well-conceived opposing viewpoints about how to criticize PRC. Chang confirms Jenne's argument, that Chinese people often conflate nation and culture, but I would agree with Chang, that objectifying one's, and others', experiences is requisite. Chang's point about "pecuniary self-interest" cuts right to the heart of the matter, but only after one understands what Jenne identifies as the fusing of "…ideas of nation and state (and later nation, state, and party) into an inseparable ideology which was then disseminated through propaganda and education to the people."

Still, that PRC can witness such antagonistic (as long as not violent) positions is more useful if more Chinese people are to earn a bigger stake in their own happiness.

A South Korean law designed to manage international marriage brokers due to take effect in June 2008 will be too late for Tran Thanh Lan and four South Koreans indicted for human trafficking in The Philippines. But,the two incidents dramatize the consequences, when South Korean men go looking for brides in lesser-developed states.

The business began in the late 1990s by matching South Korean farmers or the physically disabled mostly to ethnic Koreans in China, according to brokers and the Korea Consumer Protection Board. But by 2003, the majority of customers were urban bachelors, and the foreign brides came from a host of countries. The board says 2,000 to 3,000 agencies operate now.

The widespread availability of gender-screening technology since the 1980s has resulted in an overabundance of South Korean males. What is more, South Korea's growing wealth has increased women's educational and employment opportunities, even as it has led to rising divorce rates and plummeting birthrates.

"Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards," said Lee Eun Tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. "If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he'll find it very difficult to marry in Korea."

Critics say the business demeans and takes advantage of poor women. But brokers say they are merely matching the needs of Korean men and foreign women seeking better lives.

"But this business will get more difficult as those countries get richer," said Won Hyun Jae, the owner of i-Bombit, another agency. "Now, even a disabled Korean man can find a Vietnamese bride. But eventually Vietnamese women will ask why they have to go marry a Korean man when life in Vietnam is good."

For now, Vietnam remains a popular source of brides, second only to China. Marriages with Vietnamese women are considered so successful that the local government of at least one city, Yeongcheon, in South Korea's rural southeast, subsidizes marriage tours only to Vietnam.

There are other sides to these stories. Last October, during the Pusan International Film Festival, I also watched Hello, Stranger, in which a North Korean defector helps a Vietnamese guest worker find his Vietnamese girlfriend. Events turn to tragicomedy as he learns, that his only love, who lied when she claimed only to be working, is actually married to a South Korean man, and that his odyssey to ROK to rescue her and marry her was only a miserable failure replete with a bullying, exploitative boss and language barriers.

Whether another layer of bureaucracy can prevent such regrettable incidents is questionable, but at least it's a recognition of sorts, that all is not right. ROK is a a source, transit, and destination country for human trafficking, according to Human Trafficking.

TMH's R. Elgin has stayed interested in the warped relationship between ROK's Daewoo and Myanmar with this Brian Lee feature on an artillery deal.

«There is a watch list of countries with certain concerns. If an arms sale is made to a country on the list, it won't be for firearms or weapons but nonlethal military equipment such as transport vehicles,» Park says.

Air Force Captain Koh Hyung-geun of the Defense Acquisition Program Administration says the list includes about 30 countries and gets updated on a case-by-case basis.

«Countries that are subject to a UN arms embargo such as Burma are included on that list,» Koh says.

As human rights groups have frequently pointed out, companies and the South Korean government have colluded on arms deals in the past, which is what happens in other nations, too.

Industry officials say international arms dealers contact South Korean companies to broker deals, but the government actively lends a helping hand.

Hong Sung-jin, an official at S&T Daewoo, says military attaches working in South Korean diplomatic missions abroad sometimes oversee contracts.

I'm surprised some South Korean bureaucrat didn't complain off-the-record about why shouldn't Koreans benefit a little when the bigger corporations and states flout their influence in Myanmar openly. Aside from the indignation, though, how different is this from selling F-16s and Mirage's? Or, negotiating a treaty with a nuclear state just to sell to sell civilian nuclear technology? And, again, a South Korean corporation takes liberty with what can possibly be called the «law» in ROK.

Yuan Hongwei is pulling the Foley defense after fleeing Britain on a fake passport ahead of a warrant for distributing knock-offs. How convenient! But, in PRC, he's a hero.

I know this is old news, but this Stratfor email al