Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003-2013), will be published this spring.

Medina Jabal Town, Fort Irwin, CA, 2009

Claire Beckett is an American photographer and anthropologist. She worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin and now photographs American military training camps, young recruits, as well as Americans who have converted to Islam. Her photographs humbly confront the hypocrisies of the established attitudes toward her subjects. We asked her about the tensions present in the work and within the subjects she photographed. 

Follow Mossless magazine on Twitter and support their new book on Kickstarter.

Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

Last Tuesday, during a hearing on legislation that would permit the use of recreational marijuana in Maryland, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop testified against the bill, in the process claiming that 37 people overdosed on marijuana the first day that pot was legal in Colorado. Pristoop was apparently getting his information from the Daily Currant, a notoriously shitty, unfunny “satire” website that put up a joke piece that “reported” that those people had died back in January.

State Senator Jamie Raskin, the Democrat who sponsored the bill, immediately corrected Pristoop and told him that the Daily Currant is a comedy site. Pristoop said he would check on the error, but he was “holding on to information I was provided.” The next day Pristoop acknowledged he was wrong, but said the general objection to legalization still stands. In other words, his opinion was based on lies, but he wasn't changing it.

Now, Pristoop’s job requires that he enforce the drug laws, which in theory means that he should be more educated than the general public about what individual drugs can and can’t do. What’s disturbing is that he believed such a baseless story on faith—believed it enough to bring it up in a fancy hearing!—even though YOU CAN’T OVERDOSE ON MARIJUANA.

Depending on the circumstances, enforcers of drug laws may or may not acknowledge that there is a significant difference between drugs, even drugs placed in the same legal categories. The DEA may put marijuana in the same schedule as heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and other scary substances, but if you have some “limited youthful and experimental use of marijuana” you can still become a DEA employee—suggesting that the agency knows smoking weed is not that big of a deal. Yet you still have Michele Leonhart, the head of the DEA, criticizing President Obama’s honesty when he said alcohol was more dangerous than marijuana. (She has also previously refused to answer questions about how dangerous pot is compared to meth, heroin, or other drugs.)

The general population and even some politicians are changing their attitudes toward marijuana—Colorado and Washington were the trendsetters when it came to recreational weed, and other states seem keen to follow. But we’ve still got a lot of holdouts like Leonhart and Pristoop, old-school drug warriors whose livelihoods are so closely tied to prohibition policies that they’ll say anything to keep marijuana illegal, even if they look incredibly stupid saying it.

Here are the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-On February 27, an author and entrepreneur Peter Shankman was ticketed by the New York Police Department for going jogging in Central Park at 4:30 in the morning. Shankman tweeted a picture of the summons he received, and ranted on Facebook about the incident—according to him, a police officer told him the park didn’t open until 6 AM, and since the cop's boss was with him, he had to write the ticket. Arguably, there is a logic to closing a city park at night in order to discourage crime and loitering. But this ticket is a perfect demonstration of a society and city where cops are involved in daily life to such an extent that even when someone is harmlessly breaking the letter of the law—Shankman is training for an Ironman event and doesn’t have time to run in the park when it’s open—they get penalized by the system. Luckily for Shankman, he’s wealthy enough to fight the summons in court, or presumably pay the fine if he loses his case.

-At the Photography Is Not a Crime blog, Carlos Miller recently noted several new Youtube videos that seem to show cops pulling guns on people who refuse to stop filming police. Miller’s entire blog is devoted to the cataloging cops who arrest or intimidate citizens (including Miller himself) who film them. It’s legal to take photos in public and cops should have nothing to hide—there’s no reason for officers to draw their guns on people who are armed only with a camera. Considering the long history of police shooting folks holding wallets or reaching for waistbands, it’s perhaps a pleasant surprise that we haven’t heard of more people getting injured, or worse, because they decided to film the cops.

-Speaking of the police’s inability to identify whether something is a weapon, on February 28 a sheriff’s deputy in South Carolina shot a disabled 70-year-old man after he reached for his cane during a traffic stop. York County Deputy Terrence Knox stopped Bobby Canipe on Tuesday evening over an expired tag, and when Canipe reached into the back of his pickup for his cane, Knox reportedly thought Canipe was reaching for a rifle, so he fired multiple shots and hit Canipe once (he’s not even a good shot, apparently). The senior citizen is expected to recover while Knox is on paid leave while the shooting is being investigated. York County Police spokesperson Trent Faris expressed regret over the incident, but said that for now it appeared that Knox’s shots were an “appropriate response to what he reasonably believed to be an imminent threat to his life.” Reasonable by law enforcement standards, maybe, but that’s not all that high—if an ordinary citizen shot an unarmed old man, he’d be in jail right now.

-On Wednesday, VICE columnist Molly Crabapple reported on Phoenix’s paternalistic anti–sex worker program Project ROSE. Crabtree noted that sex workers in the city are often picked up in police stings, put in cuffs, and taken to Bethany Bible Church in order to be encouraged to take part in this program instead of going to prison. Prosecutors and cops are present, as are representatives from the project. Hundreds of individuals aren’t given the chance to talk to legal representation, yet the Phoenix Police Department’s spin is that the whole program is “voluntary.” According to Crabapple, 30 percent of all enrollees in Project ROSE complete the program. It may be better than prison, but, as Crabapple writes, ROSE’s “raids funnel hundreds of people into the criminal justice system. Denied access to lawyers, many of these people are coerced into ROSE's program without being convicted of any crime.” That’s not good.

-Two police officers in Midland, Texas, have been suspended for three days after an internal investigation showed that they had made a game out of stealing signs belonging to homeless people. Officers Derek Hester and Daniel Zoelzer took at least 18 signs and threw away ten of them. They initially tried to claim that the signs had been taken from people who had been ticketed for trespassing, but that didn’t mesh with police records. Hester’s refusal to turn in some brass knuckles procured as evidence first prompted the investigation into the officers’ super fun, not-at-all-awful game. Texts between Hester and Zoelzer expressed worry about being caught, though one message said, “Oh I don’t care lol I’m not worried.”

-In response to an increase in prescription drug overdoses (as well as a potentially related uptick in heroin use), last week the DEA continued plans to make it harder for people to get hydrocodone painkillers, the most popular of which is vicodin. Florida Congressman Vern Buchanan, who co-sponsored legislation to make this move last year, said this meant “we are one step closer to curbing the abuse of the deadly narcotics wreaking havoc on countless families and communities across our nation.” It’s tempting to think so, and drug overdoses are a serious problem, but giving the DEA more powers to police what individuals put into their bodies, or what doctors may prescribe to their patients, is not the solution. Particularly not in a world where many chronic pain sufferers don’t get the medication they need.

-Our Good Cop of the Week is Duval County, Florida, school resource officer Joe Richardson for his small act of kindness towards a stranger. Recently, a woman named Karen Susman was at a Jacksonville Walgreens when she learned that thanks to changes in her insurance, the copay for an antibiotic she needed was $72, which she couldn’t afford. She seemed to be out of luck until Richardson stepped in and bought her the medicine. Random generosity like this is made for forwarded emails from soppy old people, but it is also touching as hell and is an effective inoculation against misanthropy—and a reminder that police officers can be kind, decent people.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

Mark Williams in his uniform.

About two weeks ago, a sergeant approached Mark Williams, a correctional officer at the California Institution for Men in Chino, and told him he had to choose between his dreadlocks and his job. For 14 years Mark has supervised inmates—checked their mail, given them soap, watched them eat breakfast, workout in the Yard, driven them to radiation treatment centers, or covered their vocation release. All the while, he kept his dreadlocks in a bun, to keep them above his collar.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation manual, “Female employee’s hair shall not extend below the bottom of the collar. If the hair is long, it shall be worn in a neat, non-flamboyant style.” But the bun rule only applies to female employees.

Mark is not the only prison guard to be let go over his long dreadlocks. Last fall, Richard Williams, a probation officer in Atlanta, was fired from the Georgia Department of Corrections for not cutting his locks. Solomon Stanley, an ex-prison guard of Visalia, California, currently has a workplace suit in the state court and a civil rights suit in federal court for being harassed over his dreadlocks and beard.

Mark and these other men all claim to practice Nazarene beliefs, a sect of Christianity that requires its followers to let their hair grow, untamed.

Mark has grown his dreads since 2008. He doesn’t futz with them much, just sprays and conditions them. All he wants is to work and grow his hair. What else could a man ask for?

It’s not totally clear if Mark’s religious beliefs run very deep, or if he just wants to keep his cool hairstyle. I called him up to get some answers.

VICE: When were you told that you needed to cut your hair?
Mark Williams: This all started about two years ago. Basically, there has always been talk from friends around the office about my hair, and that some supervisors couldn’t wait to write me up for it.

I typically wear a baseball hat to work, an approved departmental visor. A sergeant was in the office with three other sergeants and a lieutenant and he asked me, “What’s up with that female hat you’re wearing?” I told him I didn’t appreciate his comment—he was being unprofessional and out of line for confronting me in front of inmates and my peers.

To me, that’s like asking if I’m gay. Why do you need to ask me if it’s a female hat? And from that, I filed for harassment. The issue went away for a while, because management stepped in.

OK, and recently?
Let’s fast-forward to February 13,^, 2014, I was sitting at my work station when I was approached by a correctional sergeant and lieutenant. They told me that a directive came from the captain’s office—if I did not cut my hair, then I would receive an ETR complaint which is like a verbal version of a written complaint. That would lead to progressive disciplinary action, which leads to termination.

Why do you think that happened?
Whenever you get a new warden or a new captain—a new supervisor who transfers in from somewhere else—they want to push the line on certain things. This could very well have been a situation where we had a new warden who happened to see me and he didn’t like it.

If there are women who have dreadlocks and I’m a male with dreadlocks, what’s the difference? There was a male officer who was Steve and who wanted to become Stephanie, and they created a restroom to accommodate her.

Who is Stephanie? How did that all go down?
Steve was a correctional peace officer in the late 80s or early 90s—he was a counselor for the inmates. He wanted to become a woman and he asked for a reasonable accommodation to fit his needs and they obliged.

Right. Would you say your dreads are connected to your Nazarene religious practice?
Absolutely. It’s what I believe in and what I stand for. It’s my spiritual belief. I feel like I have a purpose to make a difference in the lives of others and spread the love that I have within me. I’m not cutting my hair, and scripture supports that.

Mark's coworkers discussing his hair on Facebook.

So have they dismissed you?
No, I haven’t been dismissed. Technically, I’m off due to stress and for creating a discriminatory environment. Now that this has gone public, my coworkers have been discussing it all over social media. I don’t know who is for or against me anymore.

All I ask for is understanding. It’s a matter of perception and consideration. I’ve worked as a correctional officer there for 14 years, and I’ve never been written up. But over the past few years, I’ve been a target of discrimination and harassment. I want to put a stop to it.

Image by Sam Taylor

In the past, when I've asked military experts from IHS Jane's what it would take to conquer, say, America, or the UK, the idea of it actually happening in the near future was relatively far fetched. But recent events in Crimea have raised the very real possibility of conflict, so when I asked IHS Jane's Konrad Muzyka what it would take to conquer Russia, it all suddenly felt very real.

No one wants to see Putin riding into battle on the back of a nuclear warhead, but that said, I'd like to make it clear that I, for one, welcome our new Russian overlords and would like to remind them that I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground vodka caves.

VICE: I'm going to begin with a classic cliche. Over the centuries, plenty of power-hungry leaders have tried to take on Russia, convinced that they would be the first to overcome the brutal Russian winter. How could a modern army deal with this ancient problem?
Konrad Muzyka: I agree that from a historical perspective this has been a problem many countries have succumbed to. But the advent of precision guided munitions and, more importantly, nuclear weapons have completely nullified the issue. Any potential conflict with the West would most likely be fought in the air, space, and sea. Any use of land forces would be limited to capturing strategically important facilities—bridges, airfields, and the like. Given the size of Russian territory, I don't think anyone would be interested in moving their troops to Russia and holding them there.

So how quickly might any invading force find itself plunged into a nuclear winter?
Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons even in a regional conflict scenario. As such, any country taking on Russia needs to be aware of a dramatic and quick escalation that could take place. But this is a sign of weakness rather than strength.

In the days of the Red Army, it felt as though there was an endless supply of men ready to die in the name of Mother Russia. Is this still true? What's their manpower like?
That's true, but many of those sent into battle during the Second World War fought at gunpoint. Not only that of the Nazi Wehrmacht, but also that of their fellow Russian "comrades." Retreat was usually forbidden, even in a tactical sense—those who were caught falling back were either shot on the spot or court-martialed… and then usually shot.

Not a lot of TLC for the Red Army.
No. When it comes to their manpower number today, this is a question that I don't think the Russians themselves can even answer. Armed forces personnel numbers are one million, however, we estimate that this figure is much, much lower and currently stands at somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000. The army is authorized at nearly 400,000 soldiers, but its actual strength is most likely below 300,000, perhaps as low as 280,000, due to the shortage of draftees and undermanning in certain units.

So, in the event of an invasion, basically Russia would just end up chucking loads of untrained and unwilling civilians back to the frontlines?
Although efforts have been made in recent years to modernize and restructure the armed forces—with the ultimate aim of creating a fully professionalized armed forces—the truth is that in the event of a conflict, Russia will still rely on mass mobilization of its population. What is also interesting to note is that Russia still relies on its railway systems for strategic mobility. Thus, little has changed since the Second World War.

Some things never change. Which brings me to Russia's size, which has always been a problem for its enemies. There's just so much territory to cover. Is there any army in the world capable of securing a country this size?
If I were to give you a short answer, then it would be no. Russia's territory covers more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area and stretches across nine different time zones. There is simply way too much territory to seize and then control. Unless China mobilized half of its population and sent them to cover the wilderness of Siberia.

So what you're saying is you might be able to conquer Russia if you had half a billion Chinese people marauding across Siberia?
China would be an interesting case if we considered a conventional conflict scenario. This would turn ugly and most likely develop into a war of attrition. However, with only 143 million people living in Russia, guess who the winner might be... Logistically though such an operation is unsustainable, even if the Chinese lived off what they looted, captured and hunted in Russia. To give you a different perspective, it is estimated that the United States would need 500,000 troops in Afghanistan to secure the whole of the country. Russia is 26 times bigger than Afghanistan and shares borders with 16 countries.

Could a combined EU army take on Russia, or would it have to be a superpower like the US?
The EU's military capabilities are… well, not really existent. Although there are a number of EU battlegroups ready to be deployed abroad, they never have been. I just can't imagine any EU unified army, if it were ever created, taking on Russia. As I mentioned previously, any conflict with NATO countries or China would most likely involve nuclear weapons, which would, in turn, lead to mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Has there been much of a shift in relative military power between the US and Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union? And has Putin made Russia more powerful militarily in recent years?
Yes, there definitely has been. Whereas the US has reaffirmed its doctrine based on tri-service [army, navy, air force] interoperability coupled with investment into C4ISR platforms [computers and surveillance, basically], there had been no serious efforts to do the same in Russia, at least until 2008.

The short conflict with Georgia in August 2008, which was also called the last war of the 21st century, showed that in terms of wider military capabilities Russia was years, if not decades, behind the US. When, in 2008, the US could easily deploy a significant number of UAVs [drones] over Afghanistan and Iraq, Russian UAVs used in Georgia were reportedly so loud that they could be heard from miles away. As you can imagine, the quality of imagery delivered was not great either. As a result, Russian UAVs were declared useless.

A Ukrainian woman tries to talk to a Russian special forces agent in Crimea

So the decision to get involved in that tiff with Georgia could have backfired on Putin?
In a way... It became clear that Russian armed forces needed bigger investment and that the country's defense industry was unable to match Western-produced equipment. To an extent this was rectified by the procurement of UAVs from Israel, amphibious vessels from France, and multipurpose vehicles from Italy. Although, for various reasons, Russia decided to stop importing foreign military equipment.

So where does all that leave them?
A military reform that followed in the immediate aftermath of August 2008 is seeking to introduce new quality, both in terms of equipment and leadership, to Russia's armed forces and completely transform them into a modern, agile, and easily deployable fighting force. It looks nice on paper, but the reality is that they're still unable to deliver top-notch equipment, delays pile up, corruption is still a significant problem, hazing among personnel is prevalent, and the troops are poorly trained.

Moving on, how could you neutralize Russia's nuclear capability?
You can't. Russia possesses second-strike capability and unless you're ready to take a nuclear hit from Russia—which no one can—you need to embrace the notion of a total annihilation of your country.

Right.
It is estimated that Russia possesses around 4,300 nuclear warheads. Another 700 strategic and 2,000 non-strategic warheads are in storage. Just like in the case of the US, Russian deterrence is based on a triad of systems [land, air, and sea]. Even if you knocked out the land and air delivery systems/platforms, submarines fitted with nuclear ICBMs would be virtually undetectable once they'd left Russian ports.

Apart from that, where do Russia's military strengths lie? Should we be worried about the navy?
Russia has never been a maritime power. Its navy relies on a small number of major combatants to support its commitment to exercises, counter-piracy patrols and global presence missions. The newest major surface combatant is more than 20 years old. The average age of Russia's large surface combatants, even excluding the two oldest vessels, is 27 years. Its sole aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, was commissioned in 1990 and requires modernization, which is planned to take place by the end of the decade. This means that Russia will lose a significant part of its power projection capability for two to four years. There are plans to build a fleet of carriers but Russia is not expected to commence work on the program until 2025 at the earliest.

And its air force?
In general, it's much better than the Russian navy. A number of new aircraft is introduced to the service each year. Some of them—the Su-35, for example—are comparable to the F-22. Some would even argue that some of the Su-35's characteristics, especially its maneuverability, are better than those of Western aircraft, including the F-22 and the F-35.

Obviously Russia is flexing its muscles in the Crimea at the moment. Does it have a lot of military bases along the Ukrainian border?
Russia leases a naval military base in Sebastopol in the Crimea. Its Black Sea Fleet comprises about 20 to 40 vessels, including frigates, destroyers, and corvettes. This also included approximately 15,000 personnel. I say "included" because in the last few days Russia has deployed another 16,000 troops to the peninsula. The core of the force is based around the 7th Guards Airborne Division. These guys are not to be played with. They have been used in various operations across Europe, including the suppression of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak revolutions. More recently, they were stationed in the Caucasus fighting Chechens.

Apart from that, Russia has deployed strategic airlift aircraft to the Crimea and seized communication and air traffic control centers, as well as airports. The center of political power in the Crimea has also been captured. This presents a textbook case of how one can start an invasion. However, with 31,000 troops on the ground, Russia would find it hard to move north to eastern Ukraine. As such, Russia would need to open a second front in Eastern Ukraine.

To sum up, as far as Ukraine goes, Russia exports gas, oil, and fear.

Where would you begin an invasion of Russia and where would you go from there? I'm thinking surprise attack on Archangel [a city in the northwest of Russia, near Finland] and then move south with stealth and precision. That way, it gets warmer, not colder.
Let's discuss this as a conventional conflict scenario. The quick answer to your question is… anywhere. Russian borders are indefensible. Wherever you look at the map there are no natural obstacles that would hamper a military advance. Historically, every major advance that threatened Russia's existence (the Poles in 1610, Napoleon in 1812, Hitler in 1941) came from the Northern European Plain. This is why Stalin was so keen on seizing Central Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and why Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Russia has lost a lot of its strategic depth since 1991 and now it could potentially lose Ukraine.

Even if you started an invasion from Poland and the Baltic states, the front would be so large that Russia would either need to pray for snow and freezing temperatures or send millions of its citizens to fight. A combination of both would be preferable.

And finally, if our imagined army took control of most of Russia, where would the natives locate their efforts of guerrilla resistance? In this vast land, what would be the hardest places for an invading army to secure?
Immense land masses of central Russia would offer ample places to wage effective Daniel-Craig-in-Defiance-style insurgency campaigns. I can't also exclude Stalingrad-style urban campaigns. But as I have mentioned, this is unlikely to happen. You couldn't really live, let alone fight, in the nuclear wasteland that Russia would be turned into in the event of a conflict with China or the US.

Thanks, Konrad!

Follow Oscar (@oscarrickettnow) and Konrad (@KonradMuzyka) on Twitter.

My name is Kovvalsky and I don’t feel like a photographer; I just like taking my small camera wherever I go. These photos were taken in Warsaw, my hometown and capital of Poland. This is the place where I want to live for the rest of my life.

I have to apologize to all of my friends about publishing these photos, but to me they are the essence of Warsaw. Life in Warsaw just wouldn't be the same without you guys (and vodka).

Click here and here to see more of Kovvalsky's photos.

 

We dare you to steal this guy's sign. Photo via Flickr user Morgan Garnett

When you walk by a homeless person begging for change, you’ve got a few options. You can (A) toss him a quarter, (B) pretend you don’t see him and feel either crushing guilt or burning self-righteousness, depending on your disposition, or (C) stop and have a conversation, because guess what, homeless people are actual humans that you can talk to without their hobo germs violating your yuppie bubble.

There’s one thing you can’t do though, and that’s stage a contest with your friends to see who can steal the most cardboard hobo signs. That's what officers Derek Hester and Daniel Zoelzer were caught doing this past November in Midland, Texas, according to an internal affairs investigation dug up last week.

Panhandling doesn't violate any city law in Midland, but on November 20, eight cardboard signs were found in the trunk of Hester’s patrol car. After he was reprimanded, he texted a warning to Zoelzer, who allegedly threw away 10 signs. The officers claimed they snagged the signs while issuing criminal trespass warnings, but the investigation found no trespass warnings issued to homeless people attributed to either of them in the past year. Among the signs was one that read "Anything helps, God Bless." Later, when the officers' text messages were retrieved, a different picture emerged. On November 21, a day after he was caught, Hester sent Zoelzer the following (very sic) text message: "My bad man when he first ask me about it he didn't seem mad or anything so I just told him me and u wereaking a game outta it when we'd traspass them and stuff." Hester and Zoelzer only ended up with a three-day suspension after weeks of their "game."

“Besides being against Midland Police policy, it’s also a First Amendment violation,” Cassandra Champion told me. Cassandra is an attorney at Texas Civil Rights Project. She noted that there have been 109 instances in the past two years where officers were investigated by internal affairs, but only half of the cases were considered legitimate. Speaking about the Midlands cardboard scavenger hunt, she noted, “individuals have the right to free speech, whether that comes as speaking in a public forum or carrying a sign.”

She told me that the Midland area is staunchly conservative, but that there are no laws against begging. The police department didn’t immediately respond to my request for more information, but it’s clear they aren’t exactly proud of their boys in blue—the same officers were reported to have collected booty like brass knuckles, scales, and knives during patrol, and never logging them as evidence.

What galls Midland residents most is the three-day suspension, which appears to be a largely perfunctory punishment. “I don’t think it’s enough,” Cassandra told me. “Three days off for officers making a game of people’s lives is a terrible injustice for those who are supposed to hold these officers to the highest level of accountability.”

Photo via Flickr user Dustin Ground

Cassandra didn’t speculate on what the proper sentence would be for a case like this, but there are reasons to think it could have been much more harsh. According to Addressing Police Misconduct, a pamphlet from the Department of Justice, there is a police misconduct provision that “makes it unlawful for State or local law enforcement officers to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of rights protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. (42 U.S.C. 5 14141). The types of conduct covered by this law include, among other things, excessive force, discriminatory harassment, false arrests, coercive sexual conduct, and unlawful stops, searches or arrests. In order to be covered by this law, the misconduct must constitute a ‘pattern or practice’—it may not simply be an isolated incident.”

It would seem that a two-week long game of hobo treasure hunt would be considered a “pattern or practice,” but police discipline is often self-regulated, especially in lower level cases.

After investigating cases of police harassment of innocent civilians, the Texas Civil Rights Project recommended that the San Antonio Police Department create a “disciplinary matrix,” to establish how to respond to such violations. For example, under current law, a recent case of the San Antonio Police harassing a lesbian couple in their home after they raided the wrong house during a drug bust wasn’t originally considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment. However, a court of appeals in New Orleans eventually ruled that it was a violation, and granted the couple a settlement of $145,000 thanks to efforts of the Texas Civil Rights Project. It’s fair to say that the homeless people of Midland who had their First Amendment rights violated could benefit from that kind of justice.

The cops in Texas may think making a game out of the way people collect money to survive is entertaining. The next probelm is that those trying to help are being ignored. Cassandra believes that the justice system is happy to punish the public, but they change their tone when they find themselves as the defendant: “I just hope they do everything they can to enforce the most correct and just policies.”

Follow Thor Benson on Twitter.

VICE Mexico traveled to San Cristóbal—in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico—to meet Cheb Cheb Ibrahim, one of the first Mexican Indians to convert to Islam and a member of the only indigenous Muslim community in Mexico. There, Cheb Cheb showed off the mosque he has built with the help of Muslim architect Percy Moranchel.

Photo via Flickr user Takver

Expressing support for Israel is one of the least controversial things an American public figure can do. The majority of Americans are sympathetic to Israel, pro-Israel group AIPAC is perhaps the most influential lobbyist organization in DC, and criticizing the Jewish state has long been a “third rail” for both Democrats and Republicans—mention you think Israeli settlements in the West Bank are maybe not the best idea anyone has ever had, and you’ll get zapped by 10,000 volts of strident criticism and accusations of being an anti-Semite.

In the past several months, however, the efforts of anti-Israel activists to portray the country as a pariah have broken through to the mainstream, making generic Zionism no longer the safe position it used to be and forcing Israel’s supporters in the US and elsewhere to respond to the boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement of SodaStream, a company that has a factory in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, got a bunch of headlines last month, but a more politically charged controversy kicked off in December, when the American Studies Association (ASA), an organization of academics who study US history and culture, voted to boycott Israeli universities for being “a party to state policies that violate human rights.”

Lawmakers in New York and Maryland responded in February by introducing legislation to prevent taxpayer money from going to academic groups that boycott Israel. (Neither bill has gotten close to becoming law.) At the same time, a similar measure—called the “Protect Academic Freedom Act”—was introduced in the US House of Representatives after 134 Republican and Democratic congressmen signed a letter condemning ASA’s decision and accusing the organization of possessing “thinly veiled bigotry and bias against the Jewish State.”

The Protect Academic Freedom Act stalled, however, after a coalition of scholars, activists, and civil-rights organizations pushed back against it, arguing that the law would violate the First Amendment. The bill is so bad, a pro-Israel Democratic strategist told BuzzFeed, that even Jewish groups like AIPAC won’t support it.

Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian human-rights activist who is one of the cofounders of the BDS movement, finds it comforting that pro-Israel legislators are embracing such extreme methods.

“Trying to pass laws through Congress that would delegitimize support for boycotting Israel is quite telling,” Omar wrote to me in an email. “It shows a heightened level of frustration, even despair, by Israel in its abortive attempts to rebrand itself and to win the battle for hearts and minds.”

The BDS movement began in 2005, with the goal of isolating Israel economically and protesting its occupation of territory seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The ultimate goal is to get Israel to change its policies, just as boycotts against South Africa in the 80s helped speed the end of Apartheid. The BDS argument that Israel is an oppressive colonial state has been strengthened in recent years as Israel’s government has moved sharply to the right (an ideological transition mirrored by AIPAC), and UN investigators have accused Israel of human-rights abuses against Palestinians in Gaza.

In Europe—where negative attitudes toward Israel are much more common than in the US—efforts by human-rights organizations and trade unions have persuaded some investors to cut ties with Israeli companies that profit from activities in occupied Palestine. In January, the Netherlands’ largest pension-fund management company severed relations with five Israeli banks because of their investments in the illegal settlements; that was followed by the largest bank in Denmark's decision to blacklist Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s biggest bank, over similar concerns, as well as Luxembourg’s government pension fund's motion to boycott several Israeli companies. Around the same time, Norway announced that its state-owned investment fund wouldn’t be investing in two Israeli construction companies, because of their involvement in building illegal settlements in East Jerusalem.

“The biggest hindrance for peace talks and for a political solution is the spreading of the illegal settlements,” Liv Tørres, the general secretary for Norwegian People’s Aid, a humanitarian organization that lobbied for the Norwegian boycott, told me. “This is an issue of respecting international law and finding a political solution to the one conflict that has been unsolved and is lying there like a sore aching point for the rest of the world.”

Shahar Azani, the Israeli consul for media affairs in New York, told me the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “needs to be decided,” but he emphasized that the settlements are often used to obscure the real issues, like Palestinian hostility toward Israel.

“Unfortunately, there have been numerous attacks from the Palestinian and the Arab side against Israel,” he said, noting that Hamas—a group that has said it wants to destroy Israel—took over the Gaza Strip after Israel withdrew its settlers in 2005. “So the ordinary Israeli tells himself, when we take our people out without a final agreement, we allow ourselves to be exposed to tremendous risk.”

Far from taking anyone out, the Israeli government recently announced plans to build 1,400 new homes for settlers in Palestinian territory, despite protests from many world leaders that new settlements would endanger ongoing peace talks between Israel and Palestine. It's still not safe for US officials to speak out against the Jewish state, however. In early February, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Israel could face further boycotts if the two countries fail to reach an agreement, prompting immediate criticism from Israeli officials and American Jewish organizations, which suggested that Kerry was encouraging Palestinians to favor boycotts over negotiations. Yesterday, Kerry spoke at an AIPAC policy conference and emphasized that he didn’t support the BDS movement, saying, “ For more than 30 years, I have staunchly, loudly, and unapologetically opposed boycotts of Israel.”

Meanwhile, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly convened a meeting with senior ministers several days after Kerry’s remarks to discuss ways to combat the growing threat of boycotts, including suing companies that boycott those who do business in the settlements and encouraging anti-boycott legislation in “friendly” countries. (Calling for boycotts against Israel is already illegal within Israel thanks to a law passed in 2011.)

Though legislation targeted at academic boycotts smells too much like a violation of free speech to become law, famed trial lawyer and Israel booster Alan Dershowitz argues that the Constitution does not protect economic boycotts. He told me that Congress could theoretically pass a law to prevent companies that participate in a boycott of Israel from doing business in the United States.

“You can make boycotts illegal, actually criminal, for American companies: Let’s assume that Arizona has a law passed in which businesses can boycott gays. The federal government could make that illegal,” he said. “To me, this is analogous to the legislation boycotting gays or boycotting blacks or boycotting any other protected group.”

The United States already has anti-boycott laws in place. In 1977, Jimmy Carter made it illegal for American companies to participate in the Arab League boycott against Israel (some companies did business in the Arab world anyway and just paid a fine). Although that boycott has almost disappeared—Syria and Lebanon are the only countries that still enforce it—it does set a precedent for outlawing boycott efforts that are not sanctioned by the government.

Dima Khalidi, the director of Palestinian Solidarity Legal Support, an activist group, disagreed, telling me that boycotts that are enacted to bring about political change are unquestionably protected by the First Amendment.

“Like the boycott campaigns against Jim Crow in the southern US, or against the South African apartheid regime, the BDS movement involves nonviolent campaigns by ordinary people to pressure governments to redress a grave injustice,” she wrote in an email.

The BDS movement is clearly making waves, as demonstrated by the impact it had on SodaStream. The Israeli maker of carbonation machines got a lot of bad press after Scarlett Johansson had a public falling-out with the UK-based charity Oxfam over her endorsement of their product, and SodaStream’s stock dropped last month to its lowest point in years, possibly as a result of that controversy and the threat of continued boycotts against the company.

“The mainstream messaging of that story, at least in the UK, was that here is a celebrity forced to pick between a respected development NGO and an Israeli company. And the idea that those two are incompatible,” said British author and pro-Palestinian activist Ben White. “And it means that people will think twice about opening one’s own business or entity to that kind of reputational risk.”

Alex Ellefson is an intern at VICE.

VICE News continues its coverage of the rising tensions in Venezuela's capital against Nicolas Maduro's government. We visit a construction site near Altamura Square, where protesters are mining the leftover materials to use as barricades and weapons. As the crisis continues, the materials that protesters are using have evolved, and it seems they will stop at nothing until they see a change in their government.

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Students at Bob Jones University, where administrators recently relaunched an investigation into the mishandling of sexual-abuse cases. Photo courtesy of Bob Jones University

Samantha Field was a student at Pensacola Christian College in 2009, when she claims to have suffered repeated physical and sexual assaults—including two alleged rapes—by her ex-fiancé, a fellow student. Thanks to the school’s strict morality code, which doesn’t allow men and women to use the same elevators, much less be alone in the same room, Samantha was reluctant to report her story to the school for fear of inviting suspicion and scrutiny, if not expulsion. Eventually, other students and faculty members noticed something was wrong, and Field was called in to meet with college administrators, including the school’s dean for women, who, Field says, told her that “confession [is] good for the soul.” When she remained silent, having nothing to confess, Field was sent to the school counselor.

“I started to tell her that my boyfriend had made me do things that I didn’t want to do, but she interrupted me and asked what I needed to repent of, and told me that I needed to forgive him, because otherwise I would have bitterness in my heart,” said Field, now a writer who blogs about her experience leaving the Christian fundamentalist movement. “I was trying to tell her that my boyfriend had raped me, and her reaction was to tell me that I needed to repent for my sins and not worry about my rapist’s sins.”

A spokesperson for Pensacola Christian College, Amy Glenn, declined to comment on Field’s claims, citing the school’s policy of keeping student records confidential. She added that the college follows a “well-developed set of procedures” for students seeking counseling, but she could not offer specifics on PCC’s policies regarding sexual abuse.

Sadly, Field’s story is neither surprising nor uncommon in the world of Christian fundamentalism, where sexual contact is strictly forbidden outside of marriage and total submission to religious authority figures is required of all believers. Even though the Catholic Church has been home to the most high-profile pedophilia scandals, Evangelical churches, schools, and missionary groups have proven to be similarly susceptible to sexual and physical abuse, and equally adept at shielding perpetrators from punishment.

The issue of how Evangelical groups—and particularly fundamentalist Bible colleges—deal with allegations of abuse has come to the fore at Bob Jones University, where school officials recently fired, and then rehired, the outside Christian consulting firm Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or GRACE, to investigate the school’s handling of sexual abuse. Led by Basyle Tchividjian, an associate law professor at Liberty University and the great-grandson of Reverend Billy Graham, GRACE has caused a stir among evangelicals for having the audacity to point out the rampant rape and abuse among fundamentalist Christian groups. In remarks to journalists last year, Tchividjian said that the Christian mission field is a “magnet for sexual abusers,” and that he believes evangelicals are worse than the Catholic Church in the way that they deal with abuse in their congregations. (Tchividjian declined to speak with me until after GRACE issues its report on BJU.) At least two other Christian groups have terminated their relationships with GRACE, including the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism—which fired GRACE just weeks before the group was scheduled to release its final report on a two-year inquiry into allegations of sexual abuse by a former missionary in Bangladesh. New Tribes Mission, another Christian missionary group, ended its relationship with GRACE after the organization completed a 2010 report on abuse at an NTM missionary school in Senegal during the 1980s. (Subsequent NTM investigations have been conducted by other outside consulting groups.)

The Bob Jones investigation, initially launched in late 2012, has been pretty earth-shattering for fundamentalist Christians. Although BJU publicly stated that the GRACE inquiry was just to “make certain that BJU’s policies and procedures for handling reports of sexual abuse both fully comply with every aspect of the law and ensure a loving, scripturally based response,” many saw the investigation as an implicit acknowledgement that sexual abuse is a reality, even among the godly students and faculty at Bob Jones.

Photo courtesy of Bob Jones University

BJU isn’t your run-of-the-mill Bible college. Located in Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University is the mother ship of American fundamentalism, with a network of alumni-founded congregations, seminaries, and Bible colleges that adhere to a brand of Christianity so strict it makes Jerry Falwell look like Dorothy Day. Students are banned from watching movies on campus, drinking alcohol, unmarried handholding, and socializing in parking garages, among other various forbidden pleasures outlined in the student handbook. Any sexual contact before marriage is grounds for expulsion.

In a culture that fetishizes chastity to the point of throwing father-daughter Purity Balls celebrating virginity, women bear a disproportionate amount of responsibility for upholding these strict social mores and are often instructed not to tempt male “urges” with their low-cut shirts and tight clothes. It is a way of thinking that implies men only do bad things to bad women who tempt them.

Of course, all of this pious moralizing requires a heavy dose of denial. BJU administrators have allegedly ignored or punished students who bring up the issue of sexual assault. Victims of abuse have claimed that school administrators called them liars and sinners and told them not to report their attacks to the police because it would hurt Jesus.  

“When I finally reported my assault to the school, the first questions they asked me were, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Was it tight?’ ‘Was it low?’” said Erin Burchwell, a BJU alumna who claims that she was assaulted more than 40 times over the course of two years by a male graduate student while she was an undergraduate. “The assumption was obviously that it was my fault, that I had done something wrong by putting myself in that situation.”

Burchwell said that the investigation initially gave her hope that she could end 15 years of silence about her abuse. Then, abruptly and without explanation, BJU announced last month that the yearlong inquiry had been terminated, just weeks before GRACE was scheduled to release its final report. Officially, BJU's president, Stephen Jones, said that the school was concerned that GRACE had gone beyond the “originally outlined intentions” of the investigation. But the subtext was that GRACE had found something that the school didn’t want people to see. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was immediate and intense. After two weeks of criticism from former students, and a scathing story in the New York Times, BJU officials apparently realized they had made a big PR blunder. On Tuesday, the school said that it was resuming the GRACE investigation and would allow a report to be made public later this year.  

If the goal was to contain the fallout, though, it looks like BJU may be too late. After the school ended the investigation, former alumni like Burchwell went public with their stories, many for the first time, sharing details about BJU’s twisted approach to sexual-abuse counseling. And the reverberations haven’t been limited to Bob Jones. A story published by the New Republic last week detailed allegations of mishandled sexual abuse cases at Patrick Henry College, a.k.a. “God’s Harvard,” including one instance in which a dean told a student who had been sexually assaulted in her sleep that if she were telling the truth, “God would have kept her conscious to bear witness to the abuse.” On Facebook and Christian blogs, people like Samantha Field have attested to getting similarly fucked-up abuse counseling at other fundamentalist churches and Christian colleges around the country.

“I’ve been really surprised by how many people have come out with their stories—and I think the school is surprised by it too,” Burchwell told me. “But this would never have happened if they hadn't tried to end the report.”

In response to Burchwell’s claims, BJU spokesperson Randy Page said that, to his knowledge, “no administrator would have told her not to report it to the police if she had wanted to go to the police.” He added that BJU has decided not to comment on claims made during the course of the GRACE investigation until after the final report has been released. He also noted that, since 2011, the school has taken several steps to improve its response to students who report past abuses, including implementing new awareness training and appointing a full-time abuse counselor.

For Samantha Field, however, the Bob Jones investigation offers little hope for breaking the cycle of abuse and victim-blaming that she argues has permeated the fundamentalist movement. “Women in this culture don't realize that they have the right to have a say what happens to their bodies. They don't understand that it’s not their fault, and they feel complicit in it,” Field told me. “They are taught [their] whole lives that women who do sexual things with their boyfriends are worthless, so they feel trapped in these abusive relationships.”

Field left fundamentalism after graduating from Pensacola Christian College in 2010. She said that she still has night terrors and panic attacks, which she attributes to not receiving proper counseling after her alleged rapes. Her former fiancé also graduated from PCC, she added. He is now a youth pastor.

Image by Courtney Nicholas

Recently, I’ve been hearing a whole lot about David Lynch, and not from the Lynch camp or concerning any new projects (what’s it been, eight or so years since Inland Empire?). Rather, I’ve been hearing about Lynch from people who have been re-watching Lynch’s work, especially Twin Peaks. I was in junior high when the series came on, and I was more interested in watching Beverly Hills, 90210 (the first incarnation, with my man Luke Perry as D-McKay).

But even my young, culturally stilted self couldn’t help being aware of the phenomenon that was Twin Peaks when it hit prime time. The first season was a juggernaut of creative innovation that television had been waiting for, as the response from critics and viewers clearly showed.

In interviews and in his book, Catching the Big Fish, Lynch says the development of the show was gradual: He and co-creator Mark Frost were approached to write a television show (they had been working on an ultimately unproduced Marilyn Monroe project), and they thought they would give it a shot. What started as a surreal mystery set in the Dakotas was shifted to the Pacific Northwest, its title referencing the layout of the fictional town, which is nestled between two peaks.

The pilot was shot with the caveat that they would film an encapsulated ending to the one-show mystery in case the show wasn’t picked up—you can find this quick wrap-up, which has Killer BOB being shot by the one-armed man in the hospital basement, on the DVD box set. Lynch and Frost didn’t think it would be picked up; the test with the network wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great. Then, seemingly against all (or at least most) odds, it was put on the air, and overnight it hit like a bomb. Everyone was asking: Who killed Laura Palmer?

The better question, however, is, Who killed Twin Peaks? And the answer to this one is easy: the same person—we’ll assume it was a network executive—who made Lynch provide a solution to the Laura Palmer murder. The key to any drama, if you want to keep it alive, is to keep the tension taut; and the key to keeping any mystery alive is to not solve the mystery. More than that, the allure of most crime mysteries, from Raymond Chandler to HBO’s new series True Detective, is not dependent on finding out whodunit. More interestingly and realistically, it’s about all the colorful characters we meet along the way, including their selective memories, the unreliable narrators, and the moral struggle inherent to all complex situations that blur the lines between right and wrong.

Another example of this sort of high-level storytelling with the crime as a backdrop is the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The story is notoriously full of plot holes, but we love it for the characters, the atmosphere, the human (i.e., flawed) relationships—in the end, no one really gives a crap about the crime or who committed it.

The death of Laura Palmer—a small-town, high school girl whose mythos casts her as both a straight-A, community-service angel and, later, a coke-snorting, orgy-having devil—was the perfect inciting incident to explore all the submerged secret lives of what on the surface appears to be a quiet, white-bread community. When one bad thing bubbles to the surface, the small town's other secrets are dredged up in the process, in thrusts and starts.

When the killer isn’t caught, everyone becomes a suspect, and thus any bit of otherwise normal business is suddenly interesting because it could be a clue. A truck driver dealing drugs to high school jocks, a man trying to get Norwegians to invest in his hotel, a logging mill burning down, a teenager having a crush on an FBI agent—all of these things become layered inside one another because of the unsolved death of Laura. But if you point to one person and say, He did it, the interest in all of those tangential strands is lost. It effectively props them all up.

Walter White’s home life in Breaking Bad, a rather sad soap opera on its own, became infinitely more compelling the longer the show went on because it was the little bit of normalcy in his life that he was trying to maintain while building a drug empire, resulting in the show's gaining a wider viewership than it would have if it had just been about the indiscretions of a drug kingpin. Not so long ago, in the timeline of the show, Walter was just a humble chemistry teacher with a pedestrian home life, and this allowed everyone to get on board; he was one of us. And if Walter White had suddenly decided that he had enough money to leave to his family after he died and quit manufacturing meth—boom, no more show. If Tony Soprano had suddenly quit the mob—boom, no more show.

As soon as Woody and McConaughey figure out who the Yellow King is—combined with McConaughey's Oscar win for an awesome performance, albeit in a movie that discounts one of the defining efforts of the gay community, their unification to fight AIDS in the face of national disregard, making Dallas Buyers Club this year’s The Help—then True Detective will be over, at least in this incarnation. But at least this show has sufficiently curbed expectations regarding the length and impact of its story line.

Twin Peaks paved the way for long-story shows; it broke the prime-time mold of episodic story telling by setting up a season-long mystery. This must be part of the reason for all the attention the show has been getting lately, at least in my circles. Lynch says he was pressured to reveal Laura’s killer—he didn’t even know who the killer was—and caving to the pressure has caused him a deep sadness.

The great David Foster Wallace wrote an essay about Lynch called “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” a smart analysis of the arc of Lynch’s career at that point (1996). Eraserhead was the film-school baby of five year’s incubation, a project that bears all the traces of a painter becoming a filmmaker in its emphasis of effect, symbol, and character over narrative clarity (Lynch claims that this was one of Kubrick’s favorite films).

The Elephant Man was the young director playing with the weird as a subject, but dressing it in a relatively conventional structure. Dune was the project that showed Lynch that he couldn’t fuck with big studios because his art depends on his full and complete control. Not because he’s a control freak, as Wallace suggests in his essay, but because his process is one of constant evolution.

It’s telling that Lynch followed Dune with Blue Velvet, because it shows him moving toward a low budget approach where he can have total control and bring the weird back into the structure. Twin Peaks is in many ways a sequel to Blue Velvet; it could easily have been called Red Velvet based on the red room of the characters’ dreams (and Lynch’s dreams).

Lynch cites Transcendental Meditation as the source for his ideas, because it has opened him to inspiration from anywhere it might come. The character of BOB and the red room of Twin Peaks came at moments of sudden inspiration. It’s hard to be in sync with such inspiration when a network is trying to make it conform to rating-friendly expectations, and in fact, treating such inspiration this way will kill ratings, as the second season of Twin Peaks clearly proved.

Nikola Tesla first discovered wireless power back in the 1890s, and yet more than a century later we're still stuck with cumbersome cables. Thankfully, not for long: There are signs that the electronics industry is finally putting wireless charging technology to good use.

Image via Vimeo user Silverdale Baptist Church

If you're anywhere near Paducah, Kentucky, on March 6 and could use a free steak and gun, you really should make sure you're at Lone Oak First Baptist at 6 PM. A guy named Chuck McAlister is going to be putting on this whole time-share presentation thing about Jesus, but after that's over, there will be a raffle, and they'll give away 25 guns. It could be a long gun, a handgun, or a shotgun. They say they're expecting 1,000 people, so your odds are only about 2.5 percent, but you're guaranteed the steak at least.

Although women aren't specifically excluded from the event, the idea seems to be aimed at attracting men. It's part of a program the Kentucky Baptist Convention is calling “outreach to rednecks.” Roger Alford, a spokesman for the convention, told Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Andrew Wolfson that the program emphasizes “God, guns, and good ol’ boys.” Also, don't worry: Raffles aren't gambling, as long as they're at church.

Paul Chitwood, the executive director of the Kentucky Southern Baptist Convention, loves the program, saying, “I don’t think hunting is inconsistent with the Gospel in any way. A lot of guys in Kentucky hunt.” He's probably right about the hunting part, but of course, bullets put holes in humans too, and when asked about that, Chitwood told the Courier-Journal, “You could buy a car and run somebody over with it.” 

Image via Lone Oak First Baptist Church website

Paducah, where the gun giveaway is happening, isn't famous for incidents of vehicular homicide, but it is known for gun violence, and I don't mean against white-tailed deer. The Heath High School shooting, in 1997, was a spree killing in neighboring West Paducah during which Nicole Hadley, 14, Jessica James, 17, and Kayce Steger, 15, were shot and killed and five others were wounded. The killer, Michael Carneal, used a—get this—long gun, a handgun, and a shotgun! But they weren't doing these church gun giveaways back then. It's just a horrifying coincidence.

In terms of knowing your audience and closing a deal, these giveaways seem to be working amazingly well. Chuck McAlister is a noted outdoorsman, host of Outdoor Channel's Adventure Bound Outdoors, and owns more than 30 guns. He claims his brand of "affinity evangelism" has created a “bridge to unchurched men so they will hear what we have to say,” saying that he knows "the hook that will attract people, and hunting is huge in Kentucky.” He recalls that at an event in Michigan 13 months ago, a place where hunting is also "huge," giving away 80 guns resulted in 282 conversions. That's a 3.5:1 ratio of souls to guns!

As an aside to the Kentucky Baptist Convention, I can't help wondering if this is really the best approach. I may be a liberal writer in a coastal city penning an article on converting Kentuckians to Christianity by giving them guns, but I know a thing or two about marketing, and this sounds a lot like a tactic the New York Times called "desperation marketing," in a 2009 column. They were referring to the monetary desperation of businesses on their last legs during the recession. The journalist and pastor John A. Dickerson's book The Great Evangelical Recession draws parallels between the state of Christianity and the state of the economy. Its inside flap reads:

Our overall membership is shrinking. Young Christians are fleeing. Our donations are drying up. Political fervor is dividing us. Even as these crises eat at the church internally, the once friendly host culture of the United States is quickly turning hostile and antagonistic. How can we avoid a devastating collapse?

I have a feeling "Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition," isn't a long-term answer.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.