A Jewish Harry Potter

Dear Readers,
Please pay heed to the publication of my incredibly talented cousin Ari's first book, "The Path of Names."
A novel of magic set at Zionist summer camp, the book could not escape being compared to a Jewish Harry Potter. Having never read Harry Potter, I cannot say if this is true. But I found I could relate immensely to the setting and the characters in a way that I imagine I could not to characters at some wizard school.
But I decided to try.

Year one
"Max," said Max's father, Leon, "you know, you're going to meet all different kinds of people at school." Max nodded, but didn't look up from his oatmeal.

"What your father means is," said Max's mother, Helen, "you might not be like the other kids over there. But you don't let that bother you." Max nodded again, swallowing more oatmeal.

"You keep your mind on your studies," Max's father said. "You'll be the first Grebler ever to go to a school like that, and you make sure that you make the most of it."

Year two

At the train station, waiting for the magical walls to de-materialize so the students of wizardry could board the sorcerous express train to school, Helen squeezed her boy's shoulder. 

"It's a long ride, all right? So there's sandwiches in your bag, Salami. I don't know what they feed you at school, so I thought you might miss it. Anyway, you eat if before it goes bad. But if your stomach doesn't sit right on the train, tell a grownup you need some air. It's okay if you're sick on the ride. Your father does too. Greblers have soft stomachs. Galitzianers."

Year three

Standing in line with the other aspiring Quiddich athletes of House Hufflepuff, Max didn't expect to make the team. But his roommates were all eager, and Max thought trying out would show them he shared some common interest, and maybe they'd stop getting so quiet and polite around him. When he got to the front of the registration line, Pomona Sprout squinted at him and smiled, but placed her hand on the stack of application forms before Max could pick one up. She reached into a black medicine bag on the table and withdrew a note from Max's doctor. And tapped twice where Dr. Melvin Kramer had circled "nosebleeds."

Year four

Crossing the lawn between classes, Max carried his Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook under his arm, paying no mind to the mill of students about him. Suddenly he was facedown, the wind knocked out of him, glasses somewhere in the grass. He groped for them and heard the cruel laughter of the Slytherin studends.

"Mug-blood!" yelled Gregory Goyle.

"Kike!" laughed Draco Malfoy.

Year five

Doloris Umbridge brought her wand down hard on Max's desk, snapping him out of his standard daydream about Luna Lovegood, in which he proves himself a daring and witty journalist recruited right out of school as the star reporter at the Quibbler, where he's groomed to succeed Xenophilious Lovegood and marry his daughter, and they live together in a Chelsea duplex. Instead he was looking into what his father would call Umbridge's trayfe punim, sure that he was about to be expelled for joining up with Dumbledor's Army, for which he'd have to face his parents wrath and explain to them that he'd signed up with a ridiculous student group because his shiksa crush had already done so.

"Eyes on your text, Grebler," Umbridge barked. "I catch you drifting off again and you'll sit in detention instead attending the Christmas Ball," she said. And half turned before snapping back to face him and saying, "Holiday Ball."

Year six

"He's not going back to that school!" Shrieked Helen at Leon. "What kind of a school has a principal die, killed by another teacher! No wonder his grades suffered."

"He's got one year left," said Leon. "Pull him out now and he won't get the references he needs for Cambridge."

Max listened to this from upstairs, dead tired from work. He'd accepted a summer internship at the Quibbler, still thinking about Luna Lovegood, only to later realize that he would spend July and August doing little other than moderating the paper's online comments section and refreshing the top stories every six hours.

"How much does it pay?" Leon asked when Max told him.

"It's more like, for credit," he said.

"This is what they teach you at that school? To get paid with credit?"

Year seven

Max never bothered to write his parents about the constant faculty changes, the siege, or what exactly a Horecrux is, because he knew his mother would get it confused with something she read in the Da Vinci Code. Instead, he went over and over in his head how he planned tell his parents he wasn't going to Cambridge. He'd been accepted to Kings College London, to read English. He'd cushion the blow by telling them that prior to the start of classes, he'd go on Birthright.  

Gun control arbitrage

A non-profit gun-rights group in Tucson, Arizona, is offering free shotguns to single women and homeowners in rough neighborhoods. The Armed Citizen Project hopes that arming entire neighborhoods will make people safer.
On the other side of the country, New York City has a gun buy-back program, paying cash for firearms, no questions asked.

Two opposite sides of the gun control debate that divides the country. But if there's one thing all Americans can appreciate, it's entrepreneurial spirit.

I wondered, could you pick up guns in Tuscon and sell them in New York at a profit?

I got the idea from an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman work out they can make money bringing soda cans from New York for refund in Michigan:

Basically the same idea as those guys, or traders who buy crude oil in New York and sell it in London. It's called arbitrage. So let's see if it works.

Google Maps puts the distance from Tucsan to New York at just under 2,500 miles.



Armed Citizen Project only gives out one shotgun per person, so I figured I'd need at least a minivan to get as many people and their guns from Arizona to New York.

A drive that long means mileage is important, so let me recommend the Nissan Quest, which gets 25 miles per gallon and seats seven for all your long-haul gun-running.

If we stick to the highways, we'll need about 100 gallons of gasoline. Prices vary state to state, but the U.S. average is $3.63 per gallon for regular fuel. So we're talking about $363 in gas.

If we make it to New York without getting arrested for transporting guns across state lines, we have to find an NYPD buyback site. New York's Finest say they've taken over 8,200 weapons off the street through the program, which offers cash - in the form of prepaid debit cards - for the guns. Although as of last weekend you can also hand over guns for a chance to win tickets to Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake. Seriously.

But hang on: The program offers $200 per handgun, but only $50 per shotgun or rifle? Why the difference? Probably because most gun murders are committed with handguns, and the NYPD buys guns in order to cut down on the number of murders.

Readers of this humble blog will recall this chart:


That's bad news for our road trip. At only $50 per shotty, seven passengers, seven guns, 2,500 miles, 25 miles per gallon, $3.63 per gallon, we'll end up exchanging the shotguns and be at least $16.30 in the red, and that's just gas, not food or motels.

But what about Newman's revelation regarding Mother's Day? Aha! Instead of sending her a card, you could mail her a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun from Arizona to New York. Using the U.S. Postal Service's online postage calculator, I figured the gun's about fifty inches long, maybe ten high and four wide, weighing seven and a half pounds... Sending a single shotgun-shaped package through priority mail should only cost $40.10!

That means if you ditch the minivan and head down to the post office, you can gross nearly $10 per gun! And yes, you can legally mail your own weapon to yourself from one state to another as long as you promise to yourself that you will only use it for legal stuff. Basically, box up your gun in Arizona and address it to yourself in New York. And if someone else in New York picks up the shotgun and turns it in to the NYPD for $50, it's hard to see where you might run afoul of the law when the NYPD promises to buy your gun, "no questions asked."

And that's how gun-control arbitrage works. Any questions?

Cosmetics and gun control

UPDATE:
Politico reports the assault weapons ban will not be part of the Democrats' Senate bill when it hits the floor in April.

Renewing the assault weapons ban in the U.S., which Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) hopes to do, won't prevent another Newtown. It won't likely make anyone safer, either. It will serve as little more than "something," so that the senator can claim to have done "something" about gun violence. It will be cosmetic, not functional. That's because it's primarily concerned with cosmetics. Here's why:

M-16

This is the M-16. It's a military rifle that can shoot fully automatic. That means that when you pull the trigger, the gun keeps firing until you let go or it runs out of bullets. It can fire ten bullets per second. Click here to watch a YouTube video demonstrating that rate of fire. The M-16, like all fully automatic weapons, is illegal to own, buy, and sell in the U.S. under federal law (with exceptions for law enforcement and military).

AR-15 M4

This is the AR-15. It's identical in almost every way to the M-16, except that it's semi-automatic. That means it fires a bullet every time you pull the trigger, enabling one to fire several rounds per second - fast, but not as fast as a fully automatic weapon. Click here to watch a YouTube video demonstrating a semi-automatic rate of fire.

There are no federal laws banning the AR-15, or the many different kinds of guns similar to it. Some states and cities restrict the ownership of such weapons. The name "AR-15" derives from name Armalite, which was the first company to widely manufacture a civilian version of the M-16. Today, "AR-15" refers to a family of essentially identical weapons made by a number of different companies.

Bushmaster .223

This is the Bushmaster .223. It's one of several AR-15 variants, and is one of the most popular rifles in the U.S. Because it looks like a military rifle, with its pistol grip and its detachable magazine capable of holding up to 30 bullets and its collapsable stock, it and weapons like it are often called "assault weapons."

It's the gun Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children and six adults at a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. James Holmes used it to kill 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And Jacob Tyler Roberts used it to kill two people and then himself at a shopping mall in Oregon.

The Senate bill would ban new sales of this gun, and other members of the AR-15 family, by classifying them as "assault weapons." But that's a distinction without a difference. To explain why, look at this gun:

Ruger Mini-14 Tactical Rifle (M-14/20GBCPC)

This is the Ruger Mini-14, another semi-automatic rifle. Compare it to the weapons in the AR-15 family: it fires the same kind of bullet (.223 caliber), it has a high-capacity magazine (20 bullets), it's about the same length (37", 1.5" longer than the Bushmaster) and about the same weight (6.5-7.0 lbs.).

The Ruger would still be legal under the Senate bill. Because it has a solid stock and a more traditional rifle grip, it's not considered an "assault weapon" in the proposed law. But the two rifles are functionally identical. The Senate bill focuses on cosmetics, banning weapons with one or more "assault weapon" features. Check this out:

Ruger Mini-14 Tactical Rifle (M-14/20CF)

This is the same Ruger Mini-14, but with a pistol grip and a collapsible stock. This version of the same gun would be banned under the proposed Senate bill. Both weapons will kill you just the same. They'll kill you just as dead as the even-more-military-looking AR-15 rifles, with the same bullets and the same rate of fire.

Moreover, the law would only ban the manufacture and sales of new assault-style weapons. If you already own one, you can keep it. You can sell it. You can buy one second-hand. There may be as many as 1.2 to 3.7 million assault-style weapons already in private hands in the country, and they could still be bought and sold.

Likewise, the bill would ban the manufacture and sale of new high-capacity magazines. But existing magazines would still be legal. Estimates for the number of existing high-capacity magazines range from the tens to the hundreds of millions.

So the bill not only lets semi-automatic rifles like the Ruger Mini-14 keep rolling off the assembly lines into private hands, it doesn't do anything to reduce the overwhelming number of AR-15 style rifles and large-capacity magazines already out there.

But let's say, for a minute, that this bill actually eliminated all the assault weapons and similar rifles in the U.S. Would that make us safer? Check out this chart:

This FBI data show more than 8,500 people were murdered with guns in the U.S. in 2011. Less than four percent were reported killed with some type of rifle. One caveat on this data: the FBI compiles these numbers from law enforcement agencies across the country, and not all agencies record and report homicide data the same way. This data reflect about 1,700 gun murders in 2011 committed with an unknown firearm type. Another 356 were murdered with shotguns. Despite these unknowns, it seems evident that the vast majority of gun victims are killed with handguns, not rifles.

Jared Laughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six used a handgun. The Virginia Tech shooter used two pistols. The shooters in Aurora and Sandy Hook both carried handguns along with their rifles. There are some provisions banning handguns under the Senate bill as well. But like the restrictions on rifles, they're largely superficial.

The prohibits the manufacture and sale of new handguns with "one or more military feature." Here's what this means in practical terms:

Glock 19 9mm

This is a Glock-19 semi-automatic pistol. Its magazine holds 15 rounds, and can hold another one in the chamber. It's a very popular handgun, standard issue with many law enforcement agencies and renowned for its durability. This is the gun Jared Laughner used to shoot Gabby Giffords and more than a dozen others. Cho Seung-Hui used a Glock-19 and another handgun to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech before committing suicide. Laugher reportedly used an extended magazine, capable of holding 31 rounds. It will be perfectly legal under Senator Dianne Feinstein's proposed assault weapons ban (the bill bans the sale and manufacture of new magazines capable of holding more than 10 bullets, but magazines manufactured and sold before the bill remain legal).
Now look at this gun:

Uzi 9mm semi-automatic

This mean-looking weapon is an Uzi 9mm semi-automatic, pictured here with a 32-round magazine.  It is currently legal under federal law, but would be banned under the proposed Senate bill, because it's considered the "semi-automatic version of an automatic firearm." That means that since there are fully-automatic Uzis out there, the semi-automatic version will be banned. This weapon is functionally identical to the Glock-19, which will remain legal to manufacture and sell. Additionally, semi-automatic Uzis already legally purchased before the ban is enacted will remain legal to own and re-sell.

I suspect this blog post will give comfort to many gun-lobby sympathizers and provoke ire from gun-control advocates. I want to live in a safer society too, with fewer gun crimes. But I want laws that will be effective, not symbolic.

The truth about cash, cont'd.

I overstated matters somewhat in a post about the U.S. housing recovery last week. I wrote "the housing market is awash in cash in a way it hasn't been in years."
That's only partially true.

Check it out:

There were about 630 thousand all-cash sales in 2005 out of a total 3.5 million U.S. home sales in 2005. Cash sales dropped from 2006 - 2008, to a low of 419 thousand, and then began to climb again. In 2011, they reached 623 thousand. Last year, they topped 680 thousand.

But home prices are down. The mean new home price in 2005 was $297,000, near the all-time high set in 2007 of $313,600, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The average price of a new home in December, 2012, was $248,900, according the U.S. Commerce Department. If that price holds for all of 2012, and if all homes - new and old - bought and sold in the U.S. in these two years went for the median new price, there would be $18 billion less in cash sales in 2012 than 2005. Since there are fewer new homes on the market today, and pre-owned homes likely sold for more in 2005 than they do today, that gap is almost certainly much, much larger.

Not quite "awash in cash." But cash sales have ticked up since 2007, while total sales have remained more or less flat. Hence the massive leap in the proportion of cash purchases on the market today.

I'm going to take a break from housing data for a bit and get back to homicide. Stay tuned.

Businessweek's cover, and the truth about cash

There were a couple of problems with Businessweek's latest cover:

1. It probably met with grand approval on Stormfront
2. The story's tagline asking "Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?" goes unanswered. In fact, it goes largely unasked. The story is in fact about a fairly fundamental recovery in housing prices in Phoenix brought about by various factors, including (a) drawdowns of existing housing stock as bank-owned homes move through foreclosure and off the market, (b) four years of below-average new home construction only now starting to keep pace with renewed demand, and (c) institutional investor demand for cheap housing as rental-income generators.
3. The cash: In fact, the housing market is awash in cash in a way it hasn't been in years. But while Businessweek puts that cash in the grubbing hands of barefoot blacks and spandexed latinas, the magazine should have shown it bound it up in neat stacks inside a briefcase. That briefcase is the real foundation of "The Great American Housing Rebound" headlined in the magazine.

Check it out:

This is data culled for a video I'm putting together as part of my day job. Possibly due to stricter underwriting requirements, cash-rich investors small and large buying up real estate, or a spike in short-sales as underwater homeowners walk away from their properties, the number of cash purchases for houses and condos is way, way up.

The total looks at 62 metropolitan areas across the U.S. and it has more than doubled since 2005. There are some regional trends: Rust belt cities like Detroit, Buffalo, and Lancaster, PA, had fairly proportions of cash purchases already back in 2005. New York's metro area did as well. Californian cities had very, very low levels of cash purchases until the recession, when levels shot way up. Vegas's rate of cash purchases skyrocketed from around 10 percent to over 50 percent.

A few caveats: I'm just looking at percentages. One reason this could show a spike in cash-only purchases is because mortgage loan-backed purchases dried up, while cash buys stayed constant.  This data also doesn't look at median prices, so the jump in cash buys could reflect the different depths of real estate collapse across the country. In Nevada and California, which saw precipitous home price collapses, more homes might be within checkbook range of home-seekers than in New York, where real estate prices took less of a hit.

But back to Businessweek's cover story: If more home purchases are done in cash, this means there's less overall leverage in the housing market. It means fewer homeowners are taking out mortgages, and that means fewer homeowners are at risk of default. Mortgage loans repackaged as securities are less likely to undercut investment portfolios. And a shortage of new home supply indicates speculators aren't yet ready to go gangbusters on the housing market. In short, there seem to be very few signs of a housing bubble. What could go wrong? A publication could use an offensive image and misleading subtitle on its cover, for one.

Kimberly McCarthy and the death penalty

Texas is set to execute Kimberly McCarthy tonight in Texas for murdering her neighbor in 1997. 

While executions declined in the U.S. over the past decade, patterns persists. And of the 1321 executions in the last 35 years, McCarthy's case stands out. 

Photo: AP/Texas Department
of Criminal Justice

First, she's a woman. McCarthy will be only the 12th woman executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. The death penalty is often invoked in murder cases with aggravating factors, such as premeditation or rape, which are both rare when the defendant is female. McCarthy was convicted of killing her elderly neighbor with a knife for drug money. Prosecutors said she severed her victim's finger to remove a diamond ring. DNA evidence tied McCarthy to two other violent murders.

Another factor: McCarthy's black. Contrary to many assumptions, most of those executed in capital cases - 56% - were white. Blacks make up about a third of all executions. 

But in other ways, McCarthy's case is typical. Not for who she is but for who her victim was.

Her victim was white, and in the U.S., you're far more likely to face the death penalty if you kill a white person. Over 75 percent of murder victims in capital cases were white. Since most murderers kill within their own race, this explains in part why more whites have been executed in the past 35 years.

But when killers cross racial lines, the numbers go a bit crazy. Since 1976, nineteen white defendants have been executed for killing black victims. In the same time, 257 black defendants were executed for murdering whites. Had Kimberly McCarthy killed a black woman in similar circumstances, she might have faced a better chance of life in prison. All but one of McCarthy's jurors where white. 

Finally, McCarthy's case exhibits the time and cost of a capital trial. Her first conviction in 1998 was tossed in 2001 by an appeals court who ruled police violated her rights by questioning her without her lawyer. She was re-tried in 2002 and convicted. The Texas court of appeals agreed with her second conviction in 2004, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her case. Starting from her second conviction, McCarthy spent about 10 years on death row. 

That's relatively short. The average time a defendant spends on death row has grown in the past three decades, and was 14 years as of 2010. There are no estimates for the full taxpayer cost of McCarthy's 10-year appeal process, but a recent study by the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization that advocates against capital punishment, found that capital cases cost the state of California over $4 billion since 1978. 

The DPIC breaks out about $1.9 billion of that as pre-trial and trial costs - presumably the costs of a murder investigation and trial - which would be incurred in any case. The rest of the costs are that of appeals and incarceration. 

'Django,' unchained and haunted by the Holocaust

There are no Nazis, and no Jews, in Django Unchained, but the Holocaust haunts Tarantino's new film nonetheless.

"Django Unchained" (2012)

Ridiculous, no? Tarantino already made a Holocaust film, Inglorious Basterds. It's more of a World War Two film (and a remake, nonetheless) but its bad guy isn't an evil German general, he's an evil German Jew-hunter. His defining act in the film's opening scene is the murder of a family of Jews hiding beneath the floorboards. Basterds isn't Schindler's List, but it's still a Holocaust movie.

Basterds also perverted the genre. Bad-ass Jews torture and bludgeon German soldiers to death and eventually - spoiler alert - pump Hitler full of lead. Tarantino's movie shares Schindler's genre, and absolutely nothing else with Spielberg's film.

But Django Unchained speaks more directly to Schindler's List, and to Holocaust films, and Holocaust questions. Tarantino's vehicle for this is, unsurprisingly, a German.

Not all Germans are Nazis, even in movies. Django's German isn't a Nazi, but his Teutonic-ness is Tarantino's back door into Auschwitz.

Christoph Waltz as King Schultz

Actor Christoph Waltz plays King Schultz, a German bounty hunter in the antebellum American south. Waltz played the nightmarish Nazi Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds. He's back in Django, once again killing for a living, only this time he's hunting petty criminals, not innocent Jews. The story begins when he buys Django (Jamie Foxx) and pays him to help him hunt his prey. Here we have the makings of a buddy flick, a la Skin Game (1971).

It's not until Schultz learns more of Django's past that the film begins to hint at greater depth. A slaveowner sold Django and his wife separately at auction, and the titular protagonist hopes to rescue her. Django tells Schultz her name is Broomhilda, a name she got from her prior owners, who also taught her German.

Schultz is surprised. Figuring it a pidgin version of Brünnhilde, a Valkyrie from Norse mythology, Schultz tells Django the story of her fairy-tale rescue by Siegfried, who braved dragons and pits of fire to pluck her from a mountain.

From here the film develops into something of a Western (the setting) and a heist film (the plot to rescue the girl), with a dash of Blaxploitation.

But Tarantino cannot merely borrow and redo something. His wants to twist a genre's neck and force it to look back on itself. There is no "Tarantino touch;" it's a full nelson. Tarantino does to the western what he did to Holocaust genre.

In the wake of the Civil War, wounded southern pride birthed a new type of hero. Former Confederate soldiers - whipped in the battlefield by Union troops and led to surrender by their leadership - did not give up the fight but carried it on as bank robbers and highwaymen. For many in the defeated Confederate states, these men were Robin Hoods. Jesse James is an historical example. Josey Wales is a fictive one. This genre of film, the "revisionist Western," is a poisoned one. There is no glamorizing of Confederate soldiers, or the Confederacy, that does not gloss over slavery. It's right there in Gone with the Wind.

This tradition is alive on television. AMC's Hell on Wheels is about a former Confederate soldier out for revenge against the Union soldiers who took from him his wife. What about slavery? Well, as the former rebel tells it, he owned slaves. But his wife enlightened him to the evils of slavery, and he first freed and then hired his former property at a fair wage.

In case you missed it, this is Ron Paul's view of slavery and the Civil War. The war was unnecessary, slavery could have been ended by other means. In the case of Hell on Wheels, all it takes is a decent woman. The war that ended slavery, and not slavery itself, is the avoidable evil.

Tarantino throttles this anti-intellectual, tacitly racist trend in American cinema. Slavery isn't quaint and it isn't old-timey. One might as soon make a film glorifying the Confederacy as one would glorifying  Nazi soldiers battling American GIs (Tarantino did that in Basterds). Tarantino creates in Django a righteousness, opposed to wickedness. One feels no sympathy for those Django guns down in his quest to rescue his wife.  And so Tarantino may have done something remarkable: He may have created a non-controversial film about slavery.

In the middle of this story there's a German, a professional killer, who is perhaps the most moral person in the film. If the wanted bill reads "dead or alive," Schultz kills his prey, brings back the body, and collects the reward. Asked if he only kills bad guys, "the badder they are, the bigger the bounty," Schultz replies. The first three men Django and Schultz hunt are wanted for crimes like robbery. But these thieves have become taskmasters. We don't see them steal, we see them whipping slaves. We feel no sympathy for these men when the bounty hunters do their job.

How can hired killers seem moral? Easily. Both characters are charming, particularly Schultz. But more so, when describing his occupation, the German says it's essentially the opposite of the slave trade. Instead of dealing in live flesh, he deals in corpses. This is a logical stretch, but with slavery so clearly displayed in the film as the height of immorality, anything that could be its opposite must be, well, pretty good.

Schultz's German-ness is initially no more than an entree into their quest to free Broomhilda. As a plot device, it means that Schultz can speak to Broomhilda, without her owners' comprehension, to facilitate the wife-heist.

For most of the film, Schultz's German-ness is a comic element, as we watch this outsider with his accented high diction speak to southern bumpkins.

Except for something near the end of the film.

Schultz agrees to purchase a slave, whom he intends to set free. He hands over a great deal of money to a tyrannical, murderous slave master, and sits down in a plush chair while the paperwork is being signed. As he sits, he ruminates on the particularly horrible death of an escaped slave at the slave master's order. While he ruminates, a harpist plucks Fur Elise. Finally, Schultz screams at the harpist to stop playing Beethoven.

Recall this scene from Spielberg's film, showing the final liquidation of the Krakow ghetto:



Not much one for subtly, Spielberg wants his audience to see the Germans as they saw themselves: civilized, while they commit the most barbarous acts. Spielberg's Nazis blast holes in Jews as easily and with the same precision as a practiced pianist on the ivories. And yet for Schultz, the music of the great composer is the only time in the film he loses his composure. He is engaged in an objectively vile act, the purchase of a human being, participating in a franchise so immoral it befouls Beethoven. It is the American slavers, in Django, who think of themselves as right, proper, and civilized.

Schultz is a carefully crafted response to the Nazis of Schindler's List. He is a German fond of Norse mythology, as was Wagner, and Hitler. He is as erudite, as well-read, and well-spoken as any of the S.S. officers seated around the table in Conspiracy. He likes the German composers. None of these things make him a Nazi. In Tarantino's hands, each one of the characteristics, right down the cheerful personality that made the same actor so horrifying in Basterds, is employed to distinguish him from the immoral world around him, the world of the antebellum south.

Not all Germans are wicked. Nearly every white American in Django is. It seems that Tarantino may have carved up, tortured, bludgeoned and blasted the Germans in Basterds so thoroughly that he could turn around in Django and show us that Americans are capable of evil too.

Debunking gun control myths

Here's my interview with UCLA's Adam Winkler, author of "Gunfight:"

Americans, gun control, and public safety

Lawmakers are looking at banning so-called "assault weapons" in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. More on this idea in a minute.

First, there's a difference between learning a lesson and passing symbolic legislation. There's a difference between saying "there oughta be a law" and fixing a problem.

Second, if there were no guns available - and guns in most part of the U.S. are very readily available - there would be fewer such massacres. People would still kill people, but they'd have a harder time killing quite so many people. Minimizing mass death is a pretty good idea. After all, you need a background check in many places to buy fertilizer so you don't build a bomb with it.

Third, this country is constitutionally incapable of "banning" guns. The Supreme Court will overturn any law broadly prohibiting gun ownership. There will be no constitutional amendment amending the Second Amendment. Handguns and rifles - semiautomatic and otherwise - will remain legal, albeit perhaps regulated. And as long as there are legal ways to get these weapons, there will be illegal uses of these weapons. Guns in some form are here to stay.

Leaving alone the fact that a large portion of this country views gun ownership as a form of near-religious expression, with firearms as veritable idols of liberty, what can be done?

Banning assault weapons is a silly idea. The Bushmaster rifle Adam Lanza used to kill is not inherently more deadly than any other semiautomatic. The difference between it and the 9- and 10-mm pistols he used is that the rifle fires a much smaller-calibre bullet with much greater power. The .223 Bushmaster rifle and other such civilian versions of military rifles are accurate over a much greater distance, but Lanza shot most of his victims at point-blank range. Suffice to say that if you're shot with a bullet from any kind of gun, you're in trouble.

The Clinton Administration passed a so-called assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. The ban was riddled with loopholes, and was not retroactive, and in no way prevented the massacre at Columbine. As long as Lanza's Bushmaster didn't have a grenade launcher, flash supressor, bayonet mount, and collapsable stock, his weapon was not considered an "assault weapon."

To better understand public safety policy, one ought to better examine the six murders committed by Jared Lee Loughner in Tuscon last year. Loughner shot eighteen people, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, with a 9-mm. Glock - not an assault rifle. That gun is standard issue to police departments across the country, and well-respected among enthusiasts for its reliability and accuracy. The semi-automatic pistol, which fires a bullet with each pull of the trigger, has a standard magazine containing 15 bullets. But Lougher, in an effort to kill as many people, used an extended magazine containing 30 rounds, plus one more in the chamber. He was able to fire 31 shots before reloading.

Lanza's .223 Bushmaster had a large banana also holding 30 rounds of ammunition. Had these men been forced to reload sooner, they still would have killed. But maybe they would not have killed quite so many, quite as easily. Clinton's assault weapons ban prohibited sales of such high-capacity magazines.

But that ban didn't really matter, even before it expired in 2004. The ban was not retroactive. One could buy and sell extended and high-capacity magazines manufactured prior to the law without prohibition. And there are thousands of these magazines in the U.S.  If one wanted to obtain one, even with the ban, it would not have been problematic.

If this country's legislators really wanted to pursue a regulatory regime that might reduce the casualties at such shootings, here's one way: were a federal law to cap the capacity of cartridged ammunition to, say, eight rounds, rather than pursue the weapons that fire them, we might enter an age wherein killers like Lougher and Lanza are at least mechanically hindered in their individual lethality.

Hunters will still be able to hunt, enthusiasts will still be able to go to the gun range, and yes, murderers will still be able to use guns to murder.

But the law must be retroactive. The law must require current, legal gun-owners to hand in the 15-round Glock and Sig Sauer magazines for, say, government-backed vouchers to buy smaller-capacity cartridges from the gun makers. Call it "cash for clips." And this clause must be non-negotiable, and loophole-free. It must apply to retail stores, gun shows, online sales. The government must remove high-capacity magazines from the U.S. civilian market, and from civilian homes.

When seatbelt laws were introduced they were not retroactive. They applied only to new cars. And a generation later there were very few cars without seatbelts. But guns - and magazines - have a longer lifespan than the average car, and even the average person. Banning only sales of new high-capacity magazines will not make Americans safer for the next several decades.

Now who thinks that the most obstructionist and divided U.S. Congress since the Civil War will be able to pass such a law?