Jason Fagone

Lately, in between other projects, I’ve been reading about guns and the gun debate. After the Newtown massacre, it’s been hard not to. Also, I live just outside of Philadelphia, where it’s likely that gun-related violence has left tens of thousands with post-traumatic stress disorder, and where 1,243 people have been shot this year alone. This is an attempt to organize my thoughts and document some of what I’ve learned. I’m far from an expert, so if you know a fair amount about this issue, you’ll probably find this stuff redundant and obvious. I’m embarrassed to say that much of it has come as a surprise to me.

This is kind of long. Maybe save it to Pocket?

1. Holy shit is it easy to get guns in America. There are more than three and a half times as many gun stores in this country  (51,438) as there are McDonald’s restaurants (14,098). Fifty thousand gun stores. 7,356 pawn shops and 61,562 licensed collectors on top of that. And this is just the regulated part of the market, where background checks are supposed to screen out those not legally allowed to own firearms: convicted felons, those “adjudicated mentally defective,” fugitives, and others. Thanks to a huge loophole in the Gun Control Act of 1968, there’s also a vast informal market of unlicensed dealers and private sellers who aren’t required to perform background checks.

A private seller can’t knowingly sell a gun to someone he suspects isn’t allowed to have one. But he’s not required to ask questions or keep records. It’s legal to sell a gun in America for cash and a handshake. Forty percent of all gun sales take place without background checks. You can get a good sense of what’s out there by browsing Armslist.com, an Internet gun exchange. ”No background check required,” reads one ad on Armslist for a Franken Gun AR15 ‘Assault Weapon’ (the ad was first pointed out by Businessweek). “Just cash face to face with valid PA Driver’s License. It’s Pandemonium!” Here’s a similar ad for a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle: “Get this one today and not have to wait a week for a background check.” Here’s one for a SCAR 16 semi-automatic rifle: “Get this rifle b4 Christmas with no waiting on a background check. I am taking CASH offers.”

The AR-15 semi-automatic rifle was Adam Lanza’s gun. It’s what he used to murder 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Have you seen all these stories about people flooding gun shows and gun shops to buy the same gun and the same high-capacity magazines of .223-caliber ammo? The simple fact is that we have no idea how many are law-abiding citizens and how many are felons, dangerously mentally ill, or otherwise prohibited from owning guns. Surely the vast majority are law-abiding citizens. But what’s the split? 99.99/.01? 98/2? No idea. We don’t know.

The obvious fix is to make background checks universal. Background checks are the low-hanging fruit of this debate. People on both the left and the right agree that we need to require them on all gun purchases. But on Meet the Press recently, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre disagreed. “What the anti-second amendment movement wants to do is put every gun sale in he country under the thumb of the federal government,” he said. “Congress debated this at length. They said if you’re a hobbyist or collector, if someone in West Virginia, a hunter, wants to sell a gun to another hunter, he ought to be able to do it without being under the thumb of the federal government.”

2. People who have lost their gun rights due to mental illness can petition to get their guns back. This is true. This is current U.S. law. Read the lead anecdote from this great 2011 New York Times piece by Michael Luo:

In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face down in his carport “talking gibberish,” according to court records. He later told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard and hearing voices. His family figured he had gone off his medication for bipolar disorder, and a judge ordered him involuntarily committed — the fourth time in five years he had been hospitalized by court order.

After Virginia Tech, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, who has sought to limit illegal gun sales, helped pass a bill to make it easier for states to share their mental-health records with the FBI, which manages the background-check system. The NRA agreed — but there was a catch. They wanted to carve out a path for people in the system — people who had been deemed “mentally defective” or involuntarily committed for mental-health care — to get their gun rights back if they could show that they were no longer a threat to public safety. The NRA said it was to help returning veterans; the NRA’s chief lobbyist told the Times, “We don’t want to treat our soldiers as potential criminals because they’re struggling with the aftermath of dealing with their service.”

“After the bill became law in 2008,” the Times writes, “the N.R.A. began lobbying state lawmakers to keep requirements for petitioners to a minimum.”

3. There isn’t enough good data. Forget, for a second, that 40 percent of gun sales take place without background checks. Forget that we can never know how many criminals are buying guns on the informal market. Let’s just ask a simple question about sales from licensed dealers. In the last month alone, three shooters intent on killing as many as possible — the Clackamas mall shooter, Adam Lanza, and the murderer of the Rochester firefighters — have selected AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. So: In the two weeks after Newtown, how many people who tried to buy AR-15s from licensed gun dealers were screened out by background checks?

We don’t know the answer. We don’t know because the government only releases the most paltry aggregate yearly data on people who are denied guns by background checks. The data on the FBI’s website is only broken down by the reason for denial: so many felons, so many fugitives, etc. It’s not broken down by state, region, city, gun shop, or type of gun.

As a nation, we collect data on auto accidents. We collect data on outbreaks of food poisoning and defective children’s toys. We do this to prevent unnecessary deaths. When it comes to guns, though, we don’t collect data in the same way. The NRA, by arguing that better data would only lead to gun confiscation, has successfully pressured Congress and some states to stop the collection and public dissemination of data that might help us get a handle on the gun-violence and illegal-gun problem.

The NRA has targeted the Centers for Disease Control, intimidating its leaders and its scientists. It has targeted doctors, supporting legislation in seven states that would punish doctors if they “even discuss firearm safety” with patients. (Florida already has such a law.) The NRA has even kept essential streams of data out of the hands of law enforcement. In 2003, a Kansas Congressman and NRA ally named Todd Tiahrt inserted an amendment into a larger spending bill that ”removed from the public record a government database that traces guns recovered in crimes back to the dealers,” according to a 2010 Washington Post story. The amendment effectively “shields retailers from lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny.” A police source told the Post that the Tiahrt Amendment “was extraordinary, and the most offensive thing you can think of. The tracing data, which is now secret, helped us see the big picture of where guns are coming from.”

Now, because the NRA and Congress have resisted building a central registry of guns, the ATF is forced to use an antiquated system to trace guns used in crimes:

When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.

In the past few weeks I’ve read a lot of arguments against passing new laws to limit illegal guns and reduce gun violence. Most of these arguments say there’s no data showing that prior laws have been effective — in particular, the assault-weapons ban of 1994-2004. Maybe that’s because the assault-weapons ban really didn’t work. (Salon has gathered studies showing that the ban was indeed effective.) But maybe it’s because Congress has made it extraordinarily hard to know the answer.

4. A semi-automatic rifle with .223-caliber ammunition is a powerful weapon. After the Sandy Hook massacre, I noticed several writers making an argument that struck me as odd: Adam Lanza’s gun — a Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle — isn’t a particularly powerful one. I first saw the argument in a New York Times story on the AR-15: “Defenders say that most AR-15s are chambered for .223 or 5.56 ammunition, low-caliber rounds that are less deadly than those used in many handguns.” It also popped up at the National Review, where Robert VerBruggen argued that “the .223-caliber ammo in Lanza’s rifle is banned for deer hunting in some states on the grounds that it’s too weak,” and at the Daily Beast, where Megan McArdle wrote that the AR-15 “is normally used for target shooting and varmint hunting; my understanding is that it is not really big enough to humanely take down a deer.”

The more I looked, the more examples I found. Here’s a former member of the NRA board of directors arguing after the Clackamas Mall shooting in Oregon that the shooter’s .223 Remington “is not a particularly high-powered cartridge at all.” Here’s the editor of a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper arguing that “The rifle used in [Newtown] was not a ‘high-powered’ rifle… most hunters consider it unethical to use .223 cartridge on deer.” Here’s Instapundit in 2003, after D.C. sniper John Muhammad was apprehended with a Bushmaster .223, criticizing a lefty journalist for referring to the Bushmaster “as a ‘high-powered rifle.’ It’s not. Rifles firing the .223 cartridge aren’t ‘high-powered’ and calling them that just shows ignorance.” In his book Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, gun-industry reporter Paul Barrett argues that “military-style rifles… do not use particularly powerful ammunition, at least compared to the .30-06 rounds preferred by many hunters.” (To be fair to Barrett, he does add later, “A couple of well-placed bullets of any standard caliber will do grievous harm.”)

It’s true that .223 rounds aren’t as large as other kinds of rounds. But everything else about the argument that they are “weak” or “less lethal” or “not particularly powerful” is false and misleading.

I didn’t realize this at first. I didn’t know enough. I had read the medical examiner’s comments about the Newtown children’s “devastating” wounds: Lanza’s bullets were “ ‘designed in such a fashion [so that] the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in,’ resulting in deep damage.” I was confused: Given the recent carnage, how could anyone say that Lanza’s rifle wasn’t high-powered? So I asked a question on my Twitter feed about the line from the New York Times article: ”Defenders say that most AR-15s are chambered for .223 or 5.56 ammunition, low-caliber rounds that are less deadly than those used in many handguns.” Seth Fletcher, an editor at Popular Science who grew up in southwest Missouri, responded in a series of tweets I’ve stitched together here:

That is one of the most disingenuous things I have ever read. I’ve fired a .223 rifle. They are cannons. *M16s* shoot .223…. Saying .223 is a small caliber and thus less deadly than handgun ammo is like saying gamma rays have short wavelengths, thus less deadly. Caliber = diameter. Not mass or velocity or power. .223 is small caliber but has LOTS of gunpowder behind it. Thus deadly at 100s of yards.

Seth linked to a picture of two rounds, a .22 and a .223, compared to a penny.

Later, I read an excerpt from C.J. Chivers’s book The Gun on Talking Points Memo:

To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly little toy. Wherever one stood, no one could deny the ballistics were intriguing. The .223’s larger load of propellant and the AR-15’s twenty-inch barrel worked together to move the tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds — in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound.

So: Is the .223 a powerful round? I guess it depends on your definition of powerful.

Would you consider a round that can bring down a 300-pound deer powerful? Here is an article from the NRA Hunter’s Rights website that makes the case for .223 as a deer-hunting round:

The .223 may be controversial as a deer round, but ammunition experts argue that it is certainly capable of getting the job done quickly and efficiently.

“With good shot placement and bullet selection, I have no doubt in my mind that you can ethically harvest medium-sized game like whitetail deer,” said Jared Kutney, centerfire rifle and pistol development manager for Federal Premium Ammunition…

Kutney points out that determining the lethality of a firearm isn’t based just on the size of the caliber. How much killing power a firearm has is a function of caliber size and bullet selection.

“Penetration and transfer of energy, or expansion of the bullet, are both critical to achieve a lethal shot,” added Kutney. “They’re just as important as caliber.”

Consider today’s intricately designed, high-power .223 ammunition, like the 55-grain Barnes Triple-Shock and 60-grain Nosler Partition by Federal Cartridge Company. According to Kutney, “Either of those loads will bring down a 300-pound whitetail.”

If the NRA doesn’t convince, check out this short clip from the show Americana Outdoors, which I discovered here. Warning: In the context of Newtown, this is difficult to watch.

In the clip, an employee of Smith & Wesson goes hunting for a giant aoudad — a goat-antelope — with a Smith & Wesson AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. The rifle is loaded with .223. “These days the technology in ammo development over the last 4 or 5 years really has come a long way,” the Smith & Wesson guy says. “It really is a viable round. It’s something that people should seriously think about.”

In the video, you see the guy setting up his rifle from 150 yards away. He trains it on the giant aoudad. The kill shot comes at 4:10 in the video. There is only one shot. The animal immediately convulses, crumples, and plunges down a rocky embankment. “That shot, I was pretty excited about it,” the Smith & Wesson guy explains afterward. “Because I took that shot on an animal that is pretty tough to kill. With a .223 round, which is pretty small… and it had no problem with this one. And it went straight down.”

I write all this with reluctance. It feels strange to respond to such an absurd argument. And the journalist Elspeth Reeve has already capably dismantled it. But I keep seeing it again and again. Opponents of new laws to limit illegal gun sales and curb gun violence clearly find it rhetorically useful to understate the power of semi-automatic assault-style rifles (also called “modern sporting rifles”). It appears to be a common and long-running strategy. I think the point is to draw those who want new laws into a trap. If opponents of new laws can convince people that the weapons aren’t as powerful as commonly portrayed, then anyone arguing for a ban on AR-15s will have to argue for a ban on “more powerful” weapons as well, like certain kinds of hunting rifles.

This is the conversation opponents of new laws want to have: a conversation about the power of the round. I think the response is obvious. As Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in the New Yorker, “…the only non-military context in which a high-capacity magazine proves decisively useful for the shooter is one in which you are trying to mow down as many civilians as possible before you get killed by a SWAT team.” Although an assault-style rifle with a bunch of 30-round magazines is undeniably a powerful weapon, the case for banning it — the gun and the magazines — rests not on the power of its round but on its ability to kill the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time.

5. There are few, if any, centrist gun experts. As others have pointed out, the two sides of this issue largely live in different worlds. Gun owners don’t understand the left’s squeamishness about guns, and the left doesn’t understand gun owners’ love of them. I wanted to learn more about guns, so I went looking for a centrist guide. I wanted to read a book by someone with ties to the gun culture who also appreciates the gun-violence problem.

All roads led to Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, assistant managing editor at Businessweek, and a guy who is often quoted as an expert in stories about guns.

I read Glock. I read everything Barrett has written about guns in the last month for Businessweek, which is a lot. I watched him on MSNBC, describing his views on guns as “idiosyncratic” — not on the right, not on the left.

Here’s what I think about Paul Barrett: very sharp reporter. Good writer. Author of an impressive, useful book. But not a centrist. Barrett writes about guns from the right.

This isn’t even a close call. You can look at how Barrett mocks Bob Costas for “indulging in fantasies” about a less lethal America; you can look at how, in Glock, he refers to those on the left “the gun controllers”; you can look at Barrett defending the NRA and praising their “characteristic flair“; you can read his column about the recent Wayne LaPierre press conference, which basically transcribed LaPierre’s talking points without disputing any of them, save for one paragraph at the end; you can listen to Barrett advise a liberal radio host to “stop talking about the guns” and instead to “talk about crime”; you can compare his post-Newtown solutions for curbing future violence (post armed guards at schools, expand registries of the mentally ill) with the NRA’s post-Newtown solutions (post armed guards at schools, expand registries of the mentally ill); you can see him, in Glock, writing with a sort of glee about the fact that, whenever the left talks about new laws, gun manufacturers simply flood the market with new guns and make a fortune from panic buying.

All of these are giveaways. But the best way to tell where Barrett stands is what’s not in Barrett’s work: any kind of critique of the gun culture. He just tells us, over and over, that we live in a gun culture, therefore new laws probably won’t work. He presents the gun culture as monolithic, righteous, and powerful beyond measure. But it’s a vast culture! Barrett doesn’t distinguish between elements within it. In Glock, the militia movement of the ’90s and the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco are all handled in one brief paragraph. President Obama is mentioned exactly twice, both times in policy contexts; you’d never get any sense that fantasies about secret Obama plans to confiscate guns and place conservatives into concentration camps might be nourishing private arsenals and stockpiles. Some random hunter who recently emailed Talking Points Memo does a better job in a few paragraphs of laying out the culture’s fault lines than Barrett does in hundreds of pages:

I can’t remember seeing a semi-automatic weapon of any kind at a shooting range until the mid-1980’s. Even through the early-1990’s, I don’t remember the idea of “personal defense” being a decisive factor in gun ownership. The reverse is true today: I have college-educated friends – all of whom, interestingly, came to guns in their adult lives – for whom gun ownership is unquestionably (and irreducibly) an issue of personal defense. For whom the semi-automatic rifle or pistol [the Glock is a semi-automatic pistol] – with its matte-black finish, laser site, flashlight mount, and other “tactical” accoutrements – effectively circumscribe what’s meant by the word “gun.” At least one of these friends has what some folks – e.g., my fiancee, along with most of my non-gun-owning friends – might regard as an obsessive fixation on guns; a kind of paraphilia that (in its appetite for all things tactical) seems not a little bit creepy. Not “creepy” in the sense that he’s a ticking time bomb; “creepy” in the sense of…alternate reality. Let’s call it “tactical reality.”

I’m not trying to pick on Barrett here. I’ve learned a lot from him. I think I’ve even gotten a few people to buy his book. I only want to point out an interesting lacuna. Polls show that gun owners hold less extreme views than the NRA leadership, and a majority of Americans support stricter gun laws. So why aren’t there more centrists who write regularly about guns? Has the influence and extremity of the NRA has made a true centrist position impossible to occupy? (I haven’t yet read C.J. Chivers’s The Gun. I’ve heard amazing things.)

More on where I’m coming from:

I haven’t written much about guns, unless you count the videogame and plastic varieties. Several years ago, I did write a long piece for GQ about a shooting in Philadelphia, a piece that involved some research into the FN 5.7 Herstal handgun. Before that, in 2003, I spent six months reporting on the Cincinnati Police Department, following a class of new recruits through the Academy. I was with them when they were issued their guns, and I was with them when they were taught how to shoot. After they graduated, I rode along with several of the new officers in the back of their cruisers. One night, I rode along in a SWAT van, on a raid. (I did the ride-alongs because I might write a book about the Cincinnati PD, but I moved out of the city before I had the chance.) Police organizations tend to support efforts to curb gun violence and promote gun safety, but I didn’t really talk to the officers about gun policy. Mostly what I got from the experience was a powerful sense of the arsenals that criminals commanded. This is what’s out there, I kept hearing. This is what we’re up against.

I don’t own a gun. Years ago, I did some target shooting at an interfaith religious retreat in rural Pennsylvania. I was taking photographs there for a college class (the photo at the top of the post is mine). It was the kind of retreat that had a belly-dancing class, Wiccan literature, and a bunch of people walking around without pants or tops. Also a gun range. I don’t remember the kind of gun I shot. I do remember being kind of distracted by the nudity. I remember the feeling of the recoil. I don’t have anything profound to say about what it was like to shoot a gun for the first time. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it. The people running the retreat told me that, for a first-timer, I was a fairly accurate shot. I felt proud.

One last note. If you see any factual errors in this post, please let me know — jfagone at gmail dot com, or jfagone on Twitter — and I’ll correct.

This morning I came across one of Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2010 pieces from Cuba — in particular, the one in which he goes to the Havana aquarium with Fidel Castro to see a dolphin show. It contains maybe the most bizarro exchange I’ve ever read. I won’t spoil it for you, but something about it fills me with glee. I’ve always liked profiles of villains, I guess, and in the best ones, there are often moments like this, when either the reporter or the subject drops his guard and you get to see a flash of kindness or joy or humanity. I’ve been trying to come up with a list of such instances — villains’ most likable moments — and the results are below, listed by villain. I was looking for a particular kind of thing here: not a puff piece, not a hit piece, but an actual meeting of minds between a journalist and a public figure. A reviled subject reaching out, a skeptical reporter willing to listen. A collision. Let me know if you think of any: @jfagone on Twitter.

UPDATE, Nov. 26: I found a few more good ones, from Ben McGrath, Seth Wickersham (h/t @AlanSiegelDC), Stephen Rodrick, and Elizabeth Gilbert. The inclusion of the McGrath story on Nick Denton stretches the definition of villain a bit, but the piece addresses the “caricature of Denton as an evil, soulless, Machiavellian puppeteer,” and it’s so enjoyable, I thought it was worth adding.

FIDEL CASTRO

“Goldberg,” Fidel said, “ask him questions about dolphins.”

“What kind of questions?” I asked.

“You’re a journalist, ask good questions,” he said, and then interrupted himself. “He doesn’t know much about dolphins anyway,” he said, pointing to Garcia [the director of the Havana aquarium]. “He’s actually a nuclear physicist.”

“You are?” I asked.

“Yes,” Garcia said, somewhat apologetically.

“Why are you running the aquarium?” I asked.

“We put him here to keep him from building nuclear bombs!” Fidel said, and then cracked-up laughing.

–Jeffrey Goldberg, Fidel: ‘Cuban Model’ Doesn’t Even Work For Us Anymore, The Atlantic, Sept. 2010

RICHARD NIXON

There was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. “We want the Boss to relax,” Ray Price told me, “but he can’t relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football.” He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting to board the press bus, then shook his head sadly. “I checked around,” he said. “But the others are hopeless — so I guess you’re it.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We had a fine time. I enjoyed it — which put me a bit off balance, because because I’d figured Nixon didn’t know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusions to thinks like “end runs” and “power sweeps” on the stump but it never occurred to me that he actually knew anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.

But I was wrong. Whatever else might be said about Nixon — and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human — he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football. At one point in our conversation, when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned  a down & out pass — in the waning moments of the 1967 Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland — to an obscure, second-string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pinpoint style and precision.

He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh & laughed: “That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!”

I was stunned. He not only remembered the play, but he knew where Miller had played in college.

–Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

This isn’t one of those pieces that I wanted to write. This is one of those pieces that I had to write, so that I can stop obsessing about something and move on.

What I’ve been obsessing about lately is the media coverage of the Penn State scandal. I can’t stop reading other people’s writing about Penn State. I can’t stop analyzing it and fact-checking it and pointing out, on Twitter, all that is dumb and lazy and opportunistic and grandstanding and cheap. I need help, is what I’m saying.

I went to Penn State. I arrived in 1996 and stayed until 2001. (I earned two degrees, journalism and photography.) I liked it there. I think I got a pretty good education. I made friends, mostly in the nerd dorm, where people hung out on Saturday afternoons in the fall and played video games and listened to DC post-hardcore records and generally took advantage of the fact that football Saturdays were the only times when the campus and the town were nice and quiet.

I attended maybe two football games in five years. They were fun! I also ate Peachy Paterno ice cream a couple times at the Penn State Creamery. Once I even saw Joe Paterno walking across a parking lot. He was alone. He looked old and shuffled along gooberishly. The man was never a dictator to me. If anything, he seemed like a loopy mascot: the sneaks, the khaki pants, the cartoonish face.

I’m not interested here in weighing in on the Penn State scandal proper. Other people have done a better job than I could do. The most powerful men at my alma mater stood by and did nothing while a pedophile raped kids. They knew it was happening, and they let it happen. They did it to preserve the reputation of the university. Those are the basic facts. They are enduringly horrifying and should never, ever be forgotten. I know that the victims can never be made whole, but I hope that the university becomes a strong advocate for their cause.

Here is what I can say. Penn State trained me as a journalist. It trained me well. So I am qualified to weigh in on the journalism of others. And I can tell you that most of the opinion journalism about Penn State, the vast majority of it, in fact, has been utter crap.

When, after the release of the Freeh Report, sports writers started to argue that Penn State football should be abolished — that the university-wide “culture of reverence for football” highlighted by Freeh was reason enough to demolish the team – I found that I disagreed. I felt that the football team was so inextricably tied to the university that if you got rid of the team, you would do irreparable damage to the parts of the university that I cared about, the parts that seemingly had nothing to do with football. I felt that abolishing the football team would harm academics. It would harm faculty recruitment. It would harm the Central Pennsylvania economy. It would produce vast and unpredictable ripple effects on people who had never had anything to do with the scandal, who had never done anything wrong.

And yet when I and others tried to make this case on Twitter, certain people would inevitably declare us coddlers of child rapists and whatnot.

So, I sat back, and I listened, and I read. I read everything.

In the end, I feel like I learned a lot about my own profession. I gained respect for writers I had never followed much, and I lost respect for writers I had long admired. I learned that it is easy, appallingly so, to smear an entire community of decent human beings with a few careless or malicious words. And I kept a mental tally of the good and the bad, because, I suppose, this is how my own brain needed to process the complex feelings I have felt over the last nine months.

A brief note before I launch into the list: I’ve kept it fairly confined. I haven’t included hucksters or sports talkers like @SportsByBrooks or @dan_bernstein, nor have I included the exemplary work of beat reporters like Sara Ganim or the execrable work of political hacks like Mark Steyn. The folks I single out below are columnists only: people who get paid to write opinion essays about the issues of the day.

I feel like this is fair.

Here we go.

THE BEST

5. “When you can plausibly argue that the eradication of a sports team would destroy an academic institution, that’s a signal the relative importance of sports and academics need to be recalibrated.“ –Josh Levin, Slate

Josh was one of the first out of the gate with a pro-death-penalty piece, and it remains one of the best. Part of the piece is an explicit response to an anti-death-penalty case that I made one night on Twitter. This particular sentence is so perceptive and Judolike in the way it uses my own best argument against me that I have to admire it. And I don’t even think Josh is wrong; if “the relative importance of sports and academics” were recalibrated at Penn State, well, that would be a good thing. (Disclosure: I’ve done a few pieces for Josh at Slate.)

4. “You can practically hear Shaughnessy coming into a paper bag while he writes that screed.“ –Drew Magary, Deadspin

Brilliant as social satire, maybe even more brilliant as media criticism. You can sense Magary’s conflict between how much he hates Penn State and the bile that rises when he reads the stuff that other people write about it. And he’s honest about both things. I love this piece. It made me laugh.

3. “He’s also a chump for thinking that shutting down the football program actually helps one child, deters one rape or addresses the problem of our reverence for the sham amateurism and skewed values created by big time college sports.“ –Dave Zirin, The Nation

Oh man. The night before this piece posted, I must have read six or seven nearly identical columns about why Penn State football should be abolished. What confused me wasn’t the tide of public opinion; what confused me was the market failure in journalism. Editors usually love counterintutive takes, and at this point, the counterintuitive take was an anti-death-penalty piece. But no one was writing that piece! Not one guy. I seriously began to despair for my profession.

Then I read Zirin. It’s not overstating it to say that this piece sort of restored my faith in journalism. In the context in which it was published, it was genuinely brave, and I think that shouldn’t be forgotten. Zirin makes all of the points I would have made if I wrote faster and had a far better command of the mendacity and corruption of sports institutions. Zirin’s beat is the intersection of politics and sports; I think this piece makes a powerful case for the value of political chops in a sports reporter.

2. “This is a child’s wish, this urgent, empty demand that someone do something, punish someone, say something, tear down a statue or rename a building or take some sort of action somehow and to some end.” –David J. Roth, The Classical

I like this piece, titled “Here’s to Shutting Up,” because it says, beautifully, and with a sort of long-zoom perceptive disgust, what I came to believe powerfully about most of the arguments about what should be done with Penn State: that they were not only wrong but deeply inadequate as well.

1. “Beyond the egregious and irreparable damage to those children, I hold them accountable for a betrayal of the people who raised me: My father, who has spent 35 years at Penn State conducting arcane organic chemistry research and teaching a generation of premed students; my mother, who spent two decades working at the university library, a wing of which now bears Paterno’s name.“ –Michael Weinreb, Grantland

Weinreb is a Penn State alum. His parents worked at the school for many years. He grew up believing in what Penn State called the “Grand Experiment” — the idea that football greatness and academic achievement could not just co-exist but reinforce each other. And so when he concludes, in this piece, that the Grand Experiment was a lie, his anguish is real and hard-earned. Here Weinreb channels an introspective faction of Penn Staters that hopes for something more than business as usual. There is no one else who has written about the school with as much historical knowledge, wisdom, eloquence, and moral force.

THE WORST

5. “Everyone who bought into that football-first, We are Penn State culture was an enabler of the continuing child abuse.” –Jan C. Ting, newsworks.org

This is from a piece by a Temple law professor. I don’t know anything about Jan C. Ting. All I know is that his argument is indistinguishable from the one in this satirical piece by The Onion.

4. “But I’d put up another darkly alluring statue behind Paterno, whispering in his ear: Mephistopheles.“ –Maureen Dowd, the New York Times

The reductio ad absurdam of Paterno-statue columns, filed more than a week post-Freeh and after hundreds of other sportswriters had already pointed out that Paterno was a sinner, not a saint. But like the last bidder at an auction, Dowd bested them all. In a piece stacked with eight references to classic literature — Marlowe, Goethe, “Damn Yankees,” Virgil, Shakespeare, Browning — Dowd didn’t just say that Paterno was a sinner. She said — she actually explicitly said — that he had made a deal with Satan.

3. “How the university leveraged football into something approximating intellectual prominence is one of the great stories of salesmanship.“ –Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post

As I said on Twitter, I actually found the old-fashioned, look-at-those-hicks elitism of this piece kind of reassuring; it’s something I’ve experienced personally. I understand it. So I wasn’t surprised to see someone use the famously bogus U.S. News and World Report rankings to mock and demean a large, diverse institution where almost a third of the students are the first in their families to attend college, and 76 percent get financial aid. ”Something approximating intellectual prominence”: it’s like a warm blanket of condescension.

2. “Was Spanier also thinking of the hotel owners?” –Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

I’ve thought a lot about this piece of Amy Davidson’s. I read it once through; it didn’t seem so bad. Then I read it again, and I started to get angry.

Here is how Davidson — who comes across like she has never seen, much less attended, a football game, or stepped foot on the campus of a major public university – summarizes the argument of people who want the Penn State football program to be preserved:

The question now is whether it is fair—whether it is humane—for anyone other than the complicit administrators to pay a price. The argument is that, if Penn State has to do without football, the ones who will suffer will be the players with scholarships, and the hotel owners in Happy Valley, and all the little sports that have grown at Penn State in football’s shadow. What did they ever do wrong?

Now, I could pick apart the straw men in this paragraph. “Hotel owners,” for instance, is a cute, dismissive way to speak about the 40,000 people who live in State College and the 1,700 jobs that depend on the $90 million that Penn State football pumps into the Central Pennsylvania economy every year. And by “all the little sports,” Davidson must mean, well, men’s and women’s volleyball, women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, baseball, softball, field hockey—the 27 out of 29 varsity sports at Penn State that produce no profits and are subsidized by the profits of football.

“All the little sports”!

But what really bothers me about this piece is the way that, after poorly summarizing the arguments of her opponents, Davidson links us to Jerry Sandusky in the very next sentence:

There is an unintentional irony in this argument: it is precisely the one that Sandusky traded on, the assumption is that the money football brings, the economic benefit, is the decisive factor in figuring out not only what is best for the university but what is right and what is wrong.

Might as well compare us to Hitler.

1. “It no longer even matters if there continues to be a university there at all.“ –Charlie Pierce, Grantland

Pierce’s piece is old. He wrote it last November, half a year before the release of the Freeh report. So I’m violating my own rules by including it on this list. But to me, this is the one that really hurts. It still hurts. This is the sentence I remember above all others. This sentence changed me.

It changed me not only because I’ve always really liked and respected Charlie Pierce’s stuff and it felt jarring to disagree with him so vehemently, but because the line, and the paragraph that contains it, is just so damned poetic. I am going to risk saying something a little ridiculous: it taught me about the power of words.

Pierce is a writer of great power and humor and grace. He writes quickly and is verifiably brilliant. And look at what he does here:

The crimes at Penn State are about the raping of children. That is all they are about. The crimes at Penn State are about the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky, and the possibility that people lied to a grand jury about the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky, and the likelihood that most of the people who had the authority at Penn State to stop the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky proved themselves to have the moral backbone of ribbon worms.

It no longer matters if there continues to be a football program at Penn State. It no longer even matters if there continues to be a university there at all. All of these considerations are trivial by comparison to what went on in and around the Penn State football program.

The first paragraph: so beautiful. So masterful. It’s like a bedtime story, with the repetition. And then Pierce hits you with these two perfect lines, perfectly rhythmic and perfectly casual: “It no longer matters if there continues to be a football program at Penn State. It no longer even matters if there continues to be a university there at all.” And you’re already onto the next part of the piece before you realize what Pierce is actually advocating for: the wholesale removal of an entire American university. Just sort of scraping it away like gum on his shoe. He never even breaks stride.

That is writing.

But you know what? That is all that it is.

It’s not online yet, so you’ll have to buy a copy of Esquire to read it, but Tom Junod’s latest story, The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama, is well worth seeking out — a remarkable fusion of storytelling and argument. Written in the second person, as if addressed directly to Obama himself, it makes the case that Obama has carved out a new doctrine of targeted assassination that will have ripple effects for decades to come. Junod writes like no one else, but in particular, he writes about morality like no one else, with brutal exactness. And this is a story about morality:

Since taking office, you have killed thousands of people identified as terrorists or militants outside the theater of Afghanistan. You have captured and detained one. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are killing instead of capturing — “that’s not even the right question,” says the former administration official, who is familiar with the targeting process. “It’s not at all clear that we’d be sending our people into Yemen to capture the people we’re targeting. But it’s not at all clear that we’d be targeting them if the technology wasn’t so advanced. What’s happening is that we’re using the technology to target people we never would have bothered to capture.”

The excerpt below is from a new Philly mag story by Don Steinberg, about a week he spent at a sleepaway summer camp in the Philadelphia suburbs, in search of the evocative “camp smell” that he remembers from his youth. I love this story; it’s so well-observed and unpretentious and lovely:

…I continued my informal hunt for evocative smells. I toured a boys’ bunk, Oklahoma (all the bunks are named after colleges), and it was familiar: the metal-frame bunk beds, clothes hanging on rafters, toiletries fighting for space. But it did nothing for me smell-wise. Campers don’t even bring trunks anymore. Now it’s backpacks, soft duffels. A lot at camp is softer now. They still do bunk inspections at Kweebec, but they don’t require hospital corners on sheets. They don’t play “Reveille” in the morning. “It startles the kids too much,” Rachel Weiser Weisman told me. “We wake up the kids by flipping on the lights and sort of saying ‘Good morning!’”

Horseplay in general is down. Being responsible for children these days has become a high-wire act. You can’t endanger kids, you can’t discipline them, you can’t get too close. I asked Les, whom campers call Uncle Les, about navigating the modern territory. “The question comes up: How do you hug a kid?” he says. The answer at today’s camp is this: “You hug from the side.”

From time to time I get emails from people asking me about the best way to pitch stories to magazines. As it turns out, there are already many excellent pitching guides on the Internet. For my money, the best and most practical is Jennifer Kahn’s, which I saw at Gangrey. I could quibble a little with the fact that Kahn wants the writer to bear 100 percent of the burden for a successful pitch. Ater all, you can’t eliminate all risk from a story proposal. Sometimes it’s just the job of an editor to trust that you will find the idea when you arrive on location. But look, leniency and trust are for people who already know have connections and know editors, and if you don’t know editors, or even if you do, really, you need to listen to Kahn. You can’t argue with her results. If you follow her advice, you will land stories in magazines. It’s as simple as that.

If I have anything to offer here, it’s a view from the other side of the fence. The rejection side.

I’ve been lucky enough to be published in excellent, excellent magazines. I’ve worked — and still work with — editors of rare and extraordinary talent. And believe me, I’m incredibly grateful for that.

But I’ve also been rejected from many of those same magazines, and for good reason. I’m not a natural pitcher. It’s taken me years to figure out how to do it, and I still get pitches rejected. And when I started out… let’s just say that I’m glad that my email archives from 2001 to 2005 are sitting on a Zip cartridge gathering dust at the bottom of my closet.

Here’s a pitch that I sent to three national magazines earlier this year. I hit the trifecta; the pitch was essentially rejected from all three. (I say “essentially” because sometimes when you send a bad pitch the response is less like “no, it’s not a good fit for us” than “hmmmmm, can you tell us more?” and that “hmmmmm” is basically a more polite version of an outright rejection.) See if you can tell why:

On the night of February 5, 2011, the Saturday before the Super Bowl, two masked men dressed all in black allegedly sawed through the roof of a jewelry store in Houston, Texas, called Karat 22. They cut through six inches of concrete and swiftly disabled the store’s alarm system and all security cameras. Then, over the next six hours, they cleaned the store’s display cases of jewelry containing 340 pounds of gold. The two men dragged the stolen merchandise into a waiting pickup truck and drove off in the predawn light.

The style of the heist was similar to a series of 30 “rooftop burglaries” that for nearly a decade had plagued jewelry stores in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Oklahoma, and Florida, baffling the authorities. If the rooftop burglaries were all performed by the same crew, that crew amounted to perhaps the largest jewel-theft ring in the country. Always the burglars came in through the roof, dropping directly into the stores’ vaults. They never left behind any evidence. The total amount stolen by the rooftop crew stretched into the tens of millions.

The day after the Karat 22 heist, a 47-year-old ex-con named John Dewayne O’Brien, described by one Texas newspaper as “a guy with [Ben] Affleck-like good looks and athletic build,” walked into Millennium Precious Metals in Dallas, a company that specializes in melting down and removing impurities from gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and rhodium. O’Brien was carrying two Home Depot buckets full of crudely melted-down gold bars. His muscles strained under the load. He said that he had gotten the gold from another gold dealer that was liquidating its inventory. Several days later, O’Brien returned to Millennium Precious Metals with two additional buckets full of gold.

After a seven-month investigation by the FBI, the IRS, and Houston police, the authorities arrested O’Brien, along with his younger brother, Kelvin O’Brien, who is also an ex-con, and a seven-foot-tall man with a shaved head known as “Stretch.” Stretch is cooperating with the authorities. But the O’Briens say they’re innocent. As it turns out, they are in the gold business themselves. They own several jewelry shops in Dallas and elsewhere in North Texas. In a December, in a defiant interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/12/11/3585949/suspect-in-jewel-heist-proclaims.html), John O’Brien claimed that he could produce valid business receipts for every ounce of gold that he took to Millennium the day after the Karat 22 heist. After his arrest, he was able to quickly post his $750,000 bail, and has assembled a “dream team” of criminal defense attorneys that includes a former federal prosecutor and a former judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Let me know if this intrigues you. I think it could be a fun heist tale that also provides a window into the weird world — the ethics, the customs — of the booming cash-for-gold industry.

Okay.

So, you can see why this story grabbed me, yes?

1. It’s a heist story. Heist stories generally fare pretty well in the freelance marketplace. Everyone loves a good heist story, and I had been searching for a good heist narrative for quite some time.
2. It’s a GOLD heist. The phrase “buckets of gold” would probably appear in the story. Who doesn’t want to read a story about a dude (allegedly) stealing bars of gold and melting them into frickin’ buckets?
3. It’s full of wacky characters who would probably talk to a reporter.

These three elements are why, the night after I spotted this story in my RSS reader and did some more digging around, I got excited enough to write up a formal pitch.

But here’s what I fucked up:

1. There’s no original reporting. Let me type that again: There’s no original reporting. In other words, there’s no evidence in this pitch that I’ve made a single phone call to a single source, or done anything other than read newspaper clips. And in fact I haven’t. And didn’t. If you only quote newspaper clips you’re like the guy at the bar who casually lets it slip that he used to be the bassist for Marcy Playground. Who cares? And who is equipped to verify this claim? ANYBODY can say they used to be the bassist for Marcy Playground, just like anybody can read a newspaper story on the Internet and propose to do an extended version. Editors want to feel like you’ve already done some legwork to develop an original take. The general sense that you want to get across in your pitch is not “I’d like to do this story and if you say yes I’ll start making phone calls” but “I’m doing this story regardless of what happens and I think it would be very cool if the story, which I am doing regardless of what you tell me, appears in your magazine.”
2. The final phrase. “The booming cash-for-gold industry.” It’s tossed in as an afterthought when in fact it should have been the seed of the whole pitch, the thing that anchors it to the here and now.
3. There’s no deep or surprising or lived-in sense of the characters beyond their sheer wackiness. They seem like cartoons. This is lethal to a pitch. Above all, what you need to do is give your editor a sense that you’ve already worked out the story in your mind, and a story requires characters — and if it’s clear that you don’t really know the characters, then you don’t have a story, do you?
4. You tell me. The three weaknesses above are only the most obvious. But I’m sure there are others.

I’m not trying to overly flagellate myself here. I think this gold-heist thing actually could have been a long-form story somewhere. I’m confident that I could have flown to Fort Worth and spent a few weeks reporting and come back with something good; if I didn’t think that, I never would have hit “send” in the first place. But I also see why three magazines found it easy to say no. And I hope you can learn as much from my negative example as you learn from the good advice of Jennifer Kahn and others.

Deep into book revisions. I like revising. Some days I read parts of the draft I completed last November and it’s like I’m reading something written by another person. I wonder how common this feeling is among writers. I don’t think writing style changes that much in six months. It’s more like I’ve forgotten what it was like to write those pages, the emotional experience of trying and sometimes failing to solve certain problems, and now I’m just looking unemotionally at the result. Sometimes for this reason I like to read drafts on a Kindle, because the Kindle seems to speed up this distancing process. I click through the pages and start to get irritated at this person who is making me do so much clicking. CUT.

I’m not sure if Men’s Journal is going to post my tennis piece before Wimbledon is over. So I thought I’d type up my favorite part of the story, an excerpt from a Team USA practice before the team’s first-round Davis Cup tie against Switzerland (which the U.S. eventually won):

I’m riding in a black van through the Swiss countryside, on the way to watch the first U.S. practices of the week and try to figure out how American tennis fell behind and what’s being done to catch up. Sitting behind me are the two youngest players on the team: John Isner, 26, and Ryan Harrison, 19. We pass cow pastures, creeks, and quaint towns. We see signs pointing to Basel, birthplace of Roger Federer.

Harrison asks Isner, “How do you feel out on this court? I feel like shit.”

“Courier is on my ass,” Isner says. “If I don’t groove it 100 percent, he’s on my ass.”

After several minutes, the van pulls up to a large glass-fronted building in the city of Fribourg. Inside is a 7,500-seat arena with a single red-clay tennis court. In Davis Cup, the home team picks the court surface, and the Swiss choice is intended to frustrate the Americans, who tend to lose their bearings on slower, lumpier clay. According to one tennis blog that has predicted a Swiss shutout this week, clay is “American Kryptonite.”

Two Americans are trading ground strokes: [Mardy] Fish — a wily veteran who spent most of his career in Roddick’s shadow, only to surpass him last year after losing 30 pounds — and a scrawny junior the team has brought along as a sort of whipping boy…

Between points, Fish smooths piles of clay with his feet and smacks his raquet against his shoes, sending clumps of red clay flying. He does this over and over, as if the clay were some kind of toxic pudding. After a few minutes, Fish’s young hitting partner takes a seat, and Courier walks onto the court with a cardboard box full of balls, a chair, and a racquet. Courier sets the box on top of the chair. With a swipe of his wrist, he sends a ball to Fish’s forehand. Fish rips it down the line.

“Bigger,” Courier says.

Fish unloads into a cross-court forehand.

“Left shoulder down and accelerate,” Courier says, feeding several balls in quick succession.

“You’re like Nick Bollettieri,” Fish teases, referencing the infamously hard-driving Florida tennis coach who trained a young Courier, as well as Agassi, Monica Seles, and a spate of other No. 1 players.

“I think that’s a compliment, but I’m not sure,” Courier says.

Fish grins. “Gimme a backhand.”

Courier obliges. Fish raises his racquet so high that it’s almost above his head. Then he swings through the ball with a purposeful, exaggerated awkwardness, mimicking Courier’s famously idiosyncratic bahckhand. Courier gets the joke immediately.

“You don’t have the left hand fucked up enough,” Courier says.

(photo by Robert Johnson, businessinsider.com)

From Stephen Rodrick’s piece on the oil boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, in the new Men’s Journal:

…for Joe’s crew, the next 14 hours are going to suck. Every joint of the pipe has to be filled with viscous oil-based drilling mud — the K-Y of drilling lubricant — before it is dropped in the ground. One of the Payzone guys describes it to me as “the Chernobyl of drilling fluid, the most chemical-laden goop known to man.” Now, it all has to come back up. When the pipe gets pulled out of the ground, the toxic K-Y is going to fly everywhere.

Joe tells his crew what they have to do. They look at him like he has told them to start digging their own graves. And in a way he has. If the shit gets on your skin, you break out in lesions and whiteheads.

Every piece of pipe the crew pulls out has to be broken off from the next pipe with giant tongs. The first pipe is lifted high up out of the ground. Joe’s crew breaks the connections, and a giant shit grenade goes off in 3D. Sludge rains down on their helmets, splattering their goggles. Joe’s crew stares hard at the Payzone Drilling guys, who cower inside the doghouse, the one covered area on the rig. One of the Payzone guys whispers he’s afraid the crew is going to sneak into his trailer at night and squeeze their whiteheads on his pillow. I’m not sure if he’s joking.

Happily, one member of Joe’s crew is turning his frown upside down. He frenetically licks the brown ooze as it nears his mouth. The Payzone guys stand and gape.

(N.B.: I wrote this review two years ago, but I’m trying to migrate some stuff over here from my old Tumblr before I delete the Tumblr altogether.)

I should probably be doing real work now, but I can’t get this book out of my head.

Facing Future is a very tiny book about a 1993 album by a very enormous Hawaiian musician I’d never heard of, Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole. The book is so small it almost fits in a pocket. I read most of it last night while begging my wife to handle all the pre-bedtime childcare stuff. (It’s ok, I cooked. That was my contribution for the night.) I’d say the book pretty squarely accomplishes the following:

1. vividly brings to life a dead fat Hawaiian guy who played a ukelele
2. makes you care about a dead fat Hawaiian guy who played a ukelele
3. uses the complex afterlife of “Iz” as a means to explore timeless questions about art, commerce, and colonialism, in a metaphor that’s organic to the material
4. conjures Hawaii as an “old, weird” place with its own history and landscape apart from whatever you see in the background of Lost as Evangeline Lilly’s nipples are poking out
5. tells a credible anecdote about Iz beating the shit out of Jimmy Buffett in a urinal
6. includes prose such as this: “For long stretches the road’s shoulder is hard by the water. To your left the mountains rise in undulating waves, unthinkably lush and green even to their tips, pali climbing one atop the other and disappearing into the clouds that never seem to evaporate from their peaks. In the winter the waves roar to your right, the mist salting your windshield as you drive close to the spray. In the summer the sea is flat and clear and, as you brake behind the tricked-out Honda turning right into one of the countless local beach parks, you can hear, blaring out of a junk boom box in the parking lot, an unearthly voice, a lilting falsetto singing over ‘ukulele, or heavy South Seas drums, or cheesy synthesizers.”
7. rescues the word “bruddah” from terminal corniness — indeed, deploys “bruddah” in a way to almost make you weep

Not bad for 168 pages. It’s an obvious labor of love, it’s brilliant, and I’d recommend it to anyone. Congrats to author Dan Kois, who also wrote this.