Online Poker

"Michael Isikoff writes: Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader from Nevada, is pushing ahead with his efforts to legalize Internet poker before Congress adjourns this year, despite new criticism from state lottery officials, including a former Democratic National Committee chairman, that Reid's plan was an “outrageous” reward for big Las Vegas casino interests that heavily backed his campaign for re-election."

Actually, the big Las Vegas casinos were the ones who pressed for the earlier law that, while not banning online poker, made it vaguely illegal for banks or credit card companies to process transactions for consumers that are related to onlike poker... except that the rules never fully kicked in, and the banks thought they weren't really enforceable based on the language of the statute.

 The reason the casinos wanted the practice banned was because they weren't controlling it - the biggest operators are overseas.  And as far as online poker competing with Las Vegas casinos or state lotteries, the academic studies that exist seem to indicate strongly that the audience is young males 21 to 34 who are more financially successful than the median for their group. And the social impacts surveys that have been done indicate the greatest threat of online poker to an individual is how rapidly an addiction can lead to economic destruction, because you can play so many more hands per minute than you can at a casino.

The Dems decided to try to legalize it and tax it partly out of a sense that trying to stop it in the modern Internet world is foolhardy and partly because the big casino operators started yawning when asked if they were still opposed.  Meanwhile, critics like Republican Senator Jon Kyl, whose 2006 legislation capped a nine-year effort to put restrictions on internet gambling, didn't really weigh in with opposition to the trial balloons. 

And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. 

"Living for Christopher"

Massachusetts law prohibits furnishing a child with a machine gun.  That sounds like a sensible law, one that a vast plurality of people with disparate views on gun laws could meet in the middle on. 

Some things are so obvious that a law shouldn’t be necessary.  But when operators of a “Machine Gun Shoot” at a gun fair in Western Massachusetts let an eight-year-old fire an Uzi, the consequence was the death of the boy, Christopher Bizilj. The “kick” from the automatic weapon brought the barrel up to the child’s face instantly when he pulled the trigger on an October day in 2008.  

The New York Times yesterday reported that the judge in the trial of the operator of the Machine Gun Shoot that led to Christopher’s death has ruled that a video of the accident can be shown to the jury. That video should be shown to every parent in America, too. 

Sometimes the almighty dollar can get in the way of common sense. Edward Fleury, the former police chief of Pelham, Massachusetts, set up the rules of his gun fairs, and the rule for the Machine Gun Shoot at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club on October 26, 2008 allowed eight-year-olds like Christopher to shoot machine guns at his events. 

Who are the people who make quick profits putting weapons into the hands of people they know very well might not be safe to sell weapons to? You can watch those characters, in video that was shot undercover at gun shows by Colin Goddard, who was shot four times at Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007 and then became an advocate for requiring background checks on guns sold by private sellers at gun shows.  

Colin’s remarkable journey from victim to lobbyist is the subject of a powerful 40-minute documentary, Living for 32, that was just accepted to the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film competition.  You can see a trailer for the film at the film’s website, or read Executive Producer Maria Cuomo Cole’s conversation with Colin on her blog on the subject. 

The name of the film comes from Colin’s comments saying he became an advocate for the gun show legislation in honor of the 32 students and teachers who died that Virginia Tech.  Surely, Christopher Bizilj’s death should convince us all that, laws or no laws, eight year olds should not be given machine guns. 

The operators of the Machine Gun Shoot did, his defense lawyers say, go to the terrifically responsible step of recommending only appropriate machine guns for eight-year-olds.  What an altruistic group. I’m sure the jury in the trial which began last week will be very moved by that defense. – except for jurors who have, or have ever had, an eight-year-old child.  If you watch your eight-year-old eat supper, or shoot basketballs, or do his or her homework, you might develop a basic family rule that shooting a machine gun can wait. 

To be fair to Chief Fleury, his defense does make a point worth discussing when they say that the child’s father,  Dr. Charles Bizilj, holds some accountable in the tragic death as well, because Christopher had his permission to fire the gun. That’s a valid argument. In fact, the “Dr.” before Bizilj’s name leaps off the pages of a newspaper at you as an incredible irony, like the old textbook example of a poorly written headline, Man Helps Dog Bite Victim.  As someone who is also the father of an eight-year-old, however, I will leave it at that, understanding the torment  that Dr. Bizilj must know he’ll deal with for the rest of his life.  

We don’t need new gun laws in this country, some people say. That would be true if everyone exercised appropriate responsibility, if everybody would live their lives with rules like “don’t give a machine gun to an eight-year-old” and “don’t sell guns without background checks.”   But because of profit-driven businessmen like Edward Fleury and the private sellers at gun shows – and to help backstop parents who make tragic wrong choices – we do, in fact, need some new gun laws. 

Peter Hamm served as Communications Director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence for seven and a half years until he left the organization last month.

Out of the Ashes

I have recently watched a film that tells a story that I know all too well, but it is told in such a vibrant and refreshing manner that I hope many people see it.  The film is called Living for 32, and it tells the story of a new, young gun control activist who I have had the pleasure and honor of getting to know, and who may well follow in the footsteps of Jim and Sarah Brady and help our country make progress past tired old stone walls of fierce debate.

Colin Goddard, shot four times at Virginia Tech, is 25. When filmmakers Maria Cuomo Cole and Kevin Breslin first met with him, they planned to make a five-minute film about him. Then the film was 10 minutes, then 15, and it just kept growing – because the story of Colin kept going. Now it’s at 40 minutes, and Colin keeps going.

I once told the mother of one of the students who survived the Virginia Tech tragedy that I had enormous respect for the survivors who became activists. If my child had been shot, I told her, I would probably fall apart.  Colin is a clear example of the opposite reaction.

He went through months of grueling physical therapy, returned to Virginia Tech and finished his degree, then joined the staff of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to lobby for tougher gun laws.  He took a second-rate hidden camera into half a dozen gun shows and captured remarkable digital film of people buying guns without background checks.  And now he spends his days going  from office to office on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. trying to convince rather spineless members of Congress to do the right thing and vote for a bill so middle-of-the-road that Senator John McCain was once its staunchest supporter. 

I’ve left the staff of the Brady Campaign, to pursue new challenges, after almost eight years of advocating for tougher gun laws. I’d feel far guiltier about leaving if I didn’t know Colin Goddard was staying behind to keep advocating.  He and others like him are the future of the movement.  I tease him all the time, calling him “Neo.” He’s tall and looks like Robert Pattinson. He could be on the cover of Tiger Beat Magazine.

One day in April of 2009, I asked Colin to come into my office to talk about a draft of an opinion article he had written that he intended to offer to the Dallas Morning News.  Texas was considering legislation to require all public colleges and universities to allow students to bring concealed weapons to school.  Colin wanted to argue that was a bad idea.

“But this is terrible,” I told him.  “This is a compilation of statistics and facts about gun deaths, geared to make the case that Texas shouldn’t be weakening its gun laws.”

“Isn’t that what we want?” he asked me.

“Heck, no,” I shouted. “You have a story to tell that relates to the bill being voted on. So tell the story.” I squirmed in my seat, realized I was being a bit harsh. More quietly, I asked, “Colin, what happened that day?”

He squinted. “Didn’t I ever tell you?” he asked. So he told me, and I took notes, and that’s what he wrote, and you can read it here.

I’ve always been fond of Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  And in the former, this exchange has always stayed with me:

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. 'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.


'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'

Colin Goddard has a story to tell, and it’s a cautionary tale, and it’s only at the end of the beginning. He was shot by a man who shouldn’t have had a gun, according to the law. When the Virginia Tech killer burst in the door of his classroom and started shooting, Colin took out his cell phone and called the police. Then, when he was shot, he managed to get the phone to another student to stay on the line and aid the police in making a rapid response to the scene.

Eight minutes after that phone call began, with 32 dead and dying on the floors of Norris Hall, the killer ended his own life because he heard the police coming.  The facts suggest that had Colin not started that phone call, the police would have gotten there later, and the killer would have killed more people.

Colin Goddard is a modern-day phoenix, rising out of the ashes of a devastating calamity. He’s a solemn, thoughtful young man, looking around the world he’s inheriting, and shaking his head at it.  It’s one of the key changes between childhood and adulthood, when you start being dissatisfied with the landscape, instead of seeing it as boundlessly good, when you start surveying the territory to see what could be better, and thinking about how you can help make it so.

As Robert F. Kennedy said., “some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say ‘why not?’”  Colin Goddard hasn’t learned how to be old and cynical. That’s a good thing.

When he was 28 years old, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden,

“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures... I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.”

The next generation of leadership is coming, and they’re aiming to do some things better than they’ve been done by the current generation of leadership. That’s a good thing.