The globe reels in revulsion, while the Doctor Drews of the media world swarm us with words like “resilience” and “recovery.”

If past is prologue, there will be lots of that talk and less about the mind of the monster. And that’s too bad, because it appears that Mr. Castro’s lifetime impunity as a wife-beater tells us more about how to protect young women than anything we can learn from tales of female resilience in chains.

While investigators log grisly details and build a death penalty case against Mr. Castro (for DIY abortions accomplished by starving and kicking the pregnant), a team of Reuters reporters led by Mary Wisniewski has turned up details about how the local justice system repeatedly blew off the terrorized wife of the woman-hating monster of Cleveland.

The late Grimilda Figueroa’s life was nasty and short. Married to Mr. Castro and the mother of his four children, she died in April 2012 at the age of 48, from what the coroner deemed an accidental overdose of the painkiller oxycodone. Her youngest daughter, Emily, is in jail herself for trying to kill her own baby by slashing its throat.

Incredibly, the Cleveland cops and courts knew all about it.

At various times over 16 years, Mr. Castro shoved his wife down stairs, broke her ribs and nose, dislocated her shoulder, locked her in their house and forbade her from using the phone, according to relatives who have talked to reporters. She went to the hospital on several occasions. One family member compared Mrs. Figueroa and her children to hostages in their own house.

Her calls to police began in 1989, and the last came in 2005, three years after he had allegedly kidnapped the first of three young women. Even though her case was serious enough to warrant unofficial guard protection at the hospital and a private detective, Mr. Castro was never sent to jail.

In 2005, while the first abductee was already padlocked in Mr. Castro’s house, Ms. Figueroa told police her husband had threatened to kill her and her children and had “abducted” the children. Instead of taking the word of a repeat victim and finally arresting her abuser, the Cleveland cops fobbed her off, telling Ms. Figueroa it was a case for the county cops.

When she asked for a civil order of protection from the courts, she didn’t receive one because her lawyer failed to show up. Incredibly, a woman who had been hospitalized for injuries received at the hands of her husband needed a lawyer to get an order of protection.

Ms. Figueroa had hired the best legal advice her money could buy: an attorney whose law license had been suspended twice before she hired him. In 2011, he was disbarred. Ms. Figueroa gave up trying to get the order when the lawyer advised her that she would be “at a severe disadvantage” if she pursued her case without him, Reuters reported.

Had Ms. Figueroa won an order of protection, when Mr. Castro violated it—as he surely would have, based on his modus operandi —police might have gone to his house and found his caged prey.

While the sex slaves “heal” and eventually tell their awful stories on television and in books, tens of millions of women are still being beaten and killed by men one or two degrees of cunning away from Mr. Castro, driven like him to dominate females by violence.

Domestic violence, or what the CDC now calls “intimate partner violence,” is a national and international plague. One-third of female murder victims are killed by a husband or ex-husband. One in four American women will suffer “intimate partner violence” in her lifetime.

Domestic violence is the No. 1 cause of women’s ER visits. The CDC has estimated that there are 32 million victims annually. According to a CDC study, largely due to the costs and impact of domestic violence, the average cost of health care services for women is over twice the average cost for men.

Most cases are not reported to the police.

Given that he had been beating the hell out of his wife with full legal impunity, despite her repeated visits to cops and hospitals, for 10 years before his first abduction, why on earth would Mr. Castro have doubted he could get away with caging and beating some other judicially invisible poor females?

Ms. Figueroa might not have been turned away if an NYPD practice was common across the land: each precinct has a domestic violence officer detailed solely to handle intimate partner violence. These officers are empowered to make unannounced visits to homes where a family member is under a court order of protection.

Since 2005, Ohio has added victims’ advocates to the system and has become more sensitive to battered women, so that prosecutions can, theoretically, proceed even if women won’t follow through.

That’s good, but more needs to be done, and not just in the Buckeye State.

It is illegal in the U.S. to beat your wife or girlfriend, and courts across America are crawling with domestic abusers. They shuffle in with lame excuses, and some do get sentenced. A U.S. DOJ study of 15 urban counties in 2008 found that domestic violence cases were prosecuted at a rate equal to that of other felony offenses.

What the garden-variety wife-beater or even wife-killer almost never gets is perp-walked by Nancy Grace or any of the other public shamers, who are far more interested in the occasional accused pretty girl.

And that public silence is one reason why cops in Cleveland can send a repeat victim out the door without taking her case.

If domestic violence really is about “ensuring the subordination of women,” we ought to start calling it what it is: a hate crime, not unlike crimes against gays or minorities.

The PBS documentary Makers, about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, reminded viewers of the solidarity that’s been lost since those days. Women marched through New York and other major cities all the time, subject to ridicule from all sides, protesting gender discrimination. They made great advances, advances that profited my generation. But today, we can’t even get it together to push ourselves beyond 17 percent of Congress.

If a serial domestic abuser kidnapping and enslaving women while his own wife was fruitlessly begging the cops and courts to help her doesn’t engender outrage and activism, what will? Where is the outrage for Ms. Figueroa and the slaves? Why are women not marching in the streets of Cleveland, demanding to know why the city cops and judiciary never locked up a man who repeatedly smashed his wife’s face and broke her ribs?

“She was afraid.” That’s what Chris Giannini, a former police officer-turned-private investigator who tried to help protect Ms. Figueroa from Mr. Castro, told Reuters.

You bet she was.

In her funeral guest book, her son Anthony wrote, “Dear Mom. You are gone too soon. But your suffering is over.”

Let’s hope it was not in vain.

editorial@observer.com

I don’t need to wait for the big Dave Cullen or Lawrence Wright book on the psychopathological turning points that turned two brothers into the Boston bombers to know that one or both of them was seething with rage at some real or perceived diss. The truth is that it is scorned men—not women—who unleash the furies of hell.

From Boston to Baghdad, from Kabul to Korea, from Aurora to Newtown, the world is imperiled by angry men feeling disrespected, their tender sensibilities hurting so bad that their fingers are twitching on gun triggers and bomb timers.

Curiously, these guys belong to the gender with all the physical strength and most of the well-paying jobs in the world. And yet, some of them still feel so profoundly disrespected that they will go out and kill one or more of their fellow human beings just to get some of that stuff Aretha Franklin spelled out.

Scratch any jihadi and you will find a profound sense of having been disrespected and losing personal power, especially with respect to women. They are obsessed with controlling women, whose presence in their lives is simultaneously regarded as impure. Remember 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta’s will, which demanded that no woman touch his dead body and no pregnant woman come near his grave?

But it’s not just the jihadis.

All over the world, but especially in rifle-butt, no-background-check America, some men grab their easily obtainable weapons at the merest whisper of a diss from another man or a woman. Googling “disrespect” and “murder” gets more than three million results, page after page of headlines in just the English-speaking world alone, describing men—young and old, black, white, red and purple—stabbing, shooting and otherwise killing fellow citizens over perceived “disrespect.”

Some researchers estimate that two-thirds of all murders are the result of men feeling that they had been disrespected and acting to save face.

Author and psychologist Steve Taylor recently wrote an article about young men, perceived disrespect and murder. “Even more dangerously—especially with young men—slights can trigger a violent reaction,” he wrote. “Criminologists have noted that many acts of violence stem from a sense of slight ... In recent years, in the US there has been a disturbing rise in the number of ‘flashpoint killings’—casual murders triggered by trivial confrontations.

“Typically, the flash-point killer is a young man who becomes furious after feeling that he’s been slighted in front of friends.” We already know that older bro Tamerlan felt out of place in America, beat up his girlfriend and resented people’s inability to “control themselves.” There’s no doubt that someone, somewhere, made fun of his cheesy white shoes and overall Borat style. 

But why are men so liable to react violently to being disrespected, while women, who are arguably disrespected far more often in society at large, mostly just roll with it?

Women and girls face systemic sexist disrespect from childhood to the grave. There’s all the obvious, blatant stuff, like sexual harassment, videotaped rape and misogynistic rap music, not to mention getting paid three-fourths of what men do for the same work. Or, for instance, being told by men who become presidential advisers, like Larry Summers, that we are as a group no good at math and science.

Then there’s the endless dissing that is so subtle that, unless we’re students of gender politics or like to walk around gnashing our teeth all the time, we just ignore. In that category, off the top of my head, go things like a television series glamorizing female prostitution, media obsession with female politicians’ clothing, women’s work-life angst, and our own preoccupation with weight, hair, beauty and aging.

Before Tamerlan and Dzhokar made their big move last week—as literal angry white men, being from the Caucasus—I had been trying to get my head around how put-upon some men seem to feel. Whenever I write about things like misogynist bullying, videotaped rape or benevolent sexism, I get attacked for being anti-man by commentators who invariably blame the effects of feminism for any and all bad male behavior.

They always like to remind me that women commit domestic violence too. Oh yeah! Run for your lives to the nearest shelter, all you abused husbands!

I realize that great thinkers like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, have studied this subject much more than I, and come to the conclusion that men are, in fact, at an end. I don’t agree with that. I think such theories merely give aid and succor to the aggrieved, hair-trigger whiners among them.

The notion that men have come to an end is false. Yes, the world’s need for their traditional services—lifting heaving machinery, bringing home the bacon, playing football—seems to be on the wane.

But men are still very much in control and in charge. No woman has ever been Senate majority or minority leader or whip, let alone U.S. president. Men alone own the boardrooms of Apple, Tesla, Exxon, Shell and BP; every single airline; and seven of the 10 most powerful venture capital firms, including Union Square Ventures, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Shasta Ventures and Blackrock. Every director and music adviser of the New York Philharmonic has been a man, along with every director of the Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony and London Philharmonic. There’s not even a single woman in the upper ranks of the Westminster Kennel Club.

New Republic writer Lydia DePillis has created a new Tumblr page called 100 Percent Men, a visual inventory of the many realms not yet entered by a woman. It includes all of the above, as well as the current CLIO Awards jury, the top editorial staff at Talking Points Memo, and the editor in chief’s office at the New Republic. It would take an entire section of this paper to list them all.

Yes, men have had to cede some control. Wives go to work, women get to pick their mates (in America; apparently the Tsarnaev brothers’ sisters were bartered off by mom and dad in the time-honored old-country tradition), women get to choose whether to bear children (in most U.S. states), and women now make up one-fifth of the U.S. Senate. Oh, and in America, men who beat their girlfriends, like Tamerlan, can get arrested. Small advances for womankind, but for some entitled men, this is all it takes to make the world seem utterly off-kilter.

What can be done about a peculiarly male persecution complex too vast and entrenched for anti-bullying programs? We might simply have to live through this era, as these men—be they homegrown right wingers who feel slighted, angry misfits, dissed gangstas or jihadis enamored of vestigial honor cultures—slowly evolve or die off. If they don’t, pressure-cooker bombs may soon be the least of our woes.

editorial@observer.com

Ever since Seth MacFarlane sang that silly song about seeing actresses’ boobs and everyone got mad, I’ve been of two minds about whether it’s worth our time, as women, to keep fighting this particular battle.
One the one hand, we seem to have time-traveled back to the Mad Men era. Across the land, from Hollywood to Fargo, nostalgia for twinsets, garish lipstick and back-alley abortions is in vogue.

On the other hand, I too want to laugh at boob jokes, and of course, I want to be able to welcome a compliment from a president of the United States.
But O got himself a Saturday Night Live skit and a million blog posts last week when, besides praising her brilliance, dedication and toughness, he added of California Attorney General Kamala Harris: “She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country ... it’s true ... come on.”
Whoops. As the play-by-play announcers on Obama’s favorite network, ESPN, would put it: out of bounds!

He knew it, too, and shortly afterward he apologized. That pissed other people off. Because why should he apologize for saying something so nice?

It’s not like he said, “She has a really nice ass!” But the way some feminists are reacting, he might as well have.

Before we jump on O, which I am sorry to say that I am about to do, let’s remember that he gave us two really great female Supreme Court appointees who are not by any standard definition “hot.” And by saying that, I’ve just implicated myself. I can’t help it. I am hardwired to. More on that below.

I wish we were at the point where we could welcome a flattering comment from a male public figure about how a female public figure looks.

After all, what’s the first thing a woman says when she meets another woman? That’s right: “You look great.” “Love those shoes.” “Where’d you get that sweater?”

There’s a whole industry devoted to how women look, and it keeps a large swath of our city employed. Women in the U.S. spend $250 billion a year on looking good.

Of course, O was being genuine in his flattery. He clearly values good looks, and he likes looking good himself. He works out, gets photographed shirtless, praises his wife Michelle all the time (that’s okay!) and doesn’t have his own body insecurities. When asked in 2008 whether he wears boxers or briefs, he replied, “I don’t answer those humiliating questions. But whichever it is, I look good in them!”

So how is telling a woman she looks good offensive? Because in a country where trafficked women’s bodies are for sale, where gang-rapes of teen girls and victim-blaming are on the rise, and where statehouses across the land are trying to return women to forced child-bearing, reminding women that how they look still matters is sexist.

It is offensive as long as women—historically valued chiefly for how we look—still have vastly less power than men and are egregiously underrepresented in all corporate boardrooms, in Congress, in academia, in the elite media and, yes, in the White House.

The other problem with the president drawing attention to a female officeholder’s looks is that women believe—and objective evidence backs them up—that being pretty actually helps women succeed.
The opposite is, quite unfairly, totally not true.

I realize cute males in politics like Gavin Newsom and centerfold ex-Senator Scott Brown get their fair share of attention. But the vast majority of powerful men are not hot. They never have to be. Whenever I run into Harvey Weinstein, for example, or look at pictures of Mitch McConnell, I try to imagine a woman looking that way and getting to where they are.
Impossible.

Sexism is subtly and pervasively sewn into the fabric of society. Because women participate in it all the time, it’s easy for men to complain that they don’t get why our president ought not to be commenting on how prominent public officials look.

There’s a name for what O did. Social psychologists call it “benevolent sexism.” Melanie Tannenbaum, writing in Scientific American last week, pointed out how benevolent sexism explained The New York Times’s obit of rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, which started off with a description of her cooking skills.
Benevolent sexism looks a lot nicer than hostile, open sexism, Ms. Tannenbaum writes. It justifies the power imbalance between men and women, as much as—or perhaps even more than—open misogyny.

Calling a woman a bitch, a ho, a stupid girl is actually not as insidious, because it’s out in the open. Benevolent sexism perpetuates ideas that diminish women’s already limited power without giving outright offense. And if you don’t like it, you are missing a good-humor chip.

“Although it is tempting to brush this experience off as an overreaction to compliments or a misunderstanding of benign intent, benevolent sexism is both real and insidiously dangerous,” Ms. Tannenbaum writes.

The costs of benevolent sexism can be seen in every boardroom and political body in America, where women are underrepresented because they are not considered powerful or serious enough to do the job.
The day might come—for our granddaughters, I wish, but probably beyond—when gender parity arrives. Then, how America’s female political leaders look and dress will matter as little as it does for our male leaders. And then, our president will be able to say whatever she wants.

editorial@observer.com

Sadly, the same adage doesn’t apply to young American men and women watching guys strip and violate a drunken female.

By now, we’ve all absorbed the main lesson of Steubenville: the dehumanization of the female is so pervasive that young people will stand by and not just watch rape, but laugh at it, video it, tweet it, post it to Facebook, and try to cover their tracks when police investigate.

What to do?

Jackson Katz has been crusading around America for 20 years trying to change the way men respond to gender-based violence. His experiment, the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), aims to train bystanders to feel enough compassion for female victims to act, whether by intervening to discourage attacks, offering aid or calling the authorities.

Mr. Katz, the first male student to minor in women’s studies at UMass Amherst in the 1980s, has made a career writing and speaking about gender violence. “In college, I saw women standing up for public safety out of fear of male violence,” he said. “I was a big football player, but I did see dysfunctional men all around me, really damaged human beings. When I saw women standing up for themselves, I related on a visceral level. As a male, I knew I was in a position to do something about this.”

While a graduate student, Mr. Katz came up with the idea of training bystanders to prevent gender violence. In 1993, with federal funding, he started a pilot MVP program in the athletic department at Northeastern University. The program targeted male college athletes, and it has since been deployed at hundreds of colleges. The goal is to use peer pressure to transform men and boys who participate in gender-based violence and humiliation into the outliers and those who speak up into the norm, instead of the other way around.

The program works by training older students, juniors and seniors, to talk to younger peers, using an “MVP Playbook” of specific behaviors and scenarios, some of which are similar to the Steubenville incident. The scenarios have sporty names, the better to penetrate the teen male cortex. There’s “the slapshot” (you see a friend of yours hitting a girlfriend) and the “illegal motion” (you see your buddy pushing a drunken girl out of a party, and she seems reluctant to leave). Students then discuss their reactions to these scenarios and examine their own behavioral options, from “It’s none of my business” to offering aid.

So far, the program has been implemented at hundreds of colleges, among pro footballers, and in the U.S. Air Force and Navy, but in very few high schools. Steubenville High was not one of them.

Where it has been tested, high school administrators report some success. Between 2008 and 2011, Sioux City, Iowa, ran the program in three large public high schools. Over the course of the program, “positive trends” occurred with regard to 13 of the 18 abusive behaviors covered in the MVP Playbook, meaning students found those behaviors more wrong and were more willing to intervene after the program than they had been before.

The Violence Against Women Act—a federal law covering a wide range of gender violence issues, from domestic violence to rape—was reauthorized this year with a new provision mandating that high schools across the country provide bystander training.

Harvard law professor Diane Rosenfeld teaches the Gender Violence Legal Policy Workshop and has been working for years to push the federal government to fund programs like MVP in schools. “It is definitely in a school’s best interest to do as much on the prevention side as possible,” she said, noting that the Steubenville event—sensational as it was—was hardly a one-off, but a growing phenomenon among students at high schools and colleges.

Group sex attacks against girls are statistically on the rise. For the last quarter-century, since numbers have been kept, sexual violence has also become more brutal, the age of perpetrators is dropping, and attacks by multiple perpetrators are up. According to U.S. Department of Justice statistics provided by University of Arizona Public health professor Mary P. Koss, the percentage of rapes involving two or more offenders went from 7 percent in 1994-1998 to 10 percent in 2005-2010.

Easier access to violent and dehumanizing Internet porn has coincided with the increases, and many observers believe the trends are related.

And it isn’t just teenage boys who are complicit. Among the many disturbing aspects of the Steubenville case were the attitudes of the female bystanders, and the haters who took to Twitter to threaten the victim after the verdict.

Classical feminist theory has an explanation for that. In primate populations—our simian forebears—female solidarity keeps male aggression in check, and males do not form alliances to control females. The human species is alone among mammals in the degree to which male alliances subjugate females, and feminist scholars think that anomaly pre-existed and enabled patriarchal civilization. Once prehistoric human males gained the upper hand through a combination of alliances, controlling resources and, eventually, language and ideology, females found they could do better allying with males than with each other.

Et voila, the fully evolved Steubenville girl threatening to kill the rape victim.

“The numbers are telling us something,” Mr. Katz said. “There has been a dramatic desensitization to women’s humanity and sexual agency through media representations that have become completely mainstream. It is more accessible, and the porn itself has gotten way more brutal. There is no question that the level of open misogyny and brutality in our culture has grown as well.”

High school and college leaders can be reluctant to institute gender violence training and programs because they fear that to do so will implicate them in the behavior. Penn State, for example, consistently declined to institute bystander training programs in the years prior to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Mr. Katz repeatedly offered Penn State the choice of opting into his MVP program, and the school declined.

“It’s not just these boys in Steubenville, this is a systemic failure,” said Mr. Katz. “When you hear there were all these people standing around—that’s a failure of adults. We have known what to do for years. Why hasn’t gender violence training become completely mainstream in high schools?”

Mr. Katz is one courageous feminist and we applaud him. Women and girls—for the sake of ourselves, our sisters and our daughters—can only hope that his program will someday soon spawn thousands like him.

The theme of this year’s event is the “elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.” That sounds about right, but if the past is prologue, the week will pass as an expensive orgy of earnestness by day, and a Babel of networking by night, chiefly benefiting the airlines ferrying delegations in and out of JFK, and hotels and restaurants in the East 40s. Broadway shows might see a jump in ticket sales.

To roam the ballrooms and conference halls of this gas-fest means scuttling from one event to the next, sliding into chairs before daises of well-meaning NGOs and academics discussing the status of women, without ever talking about the elephant in the room, which is that feminists have been in retreat globally for at least two decades.  

Egyptian grandmothers who majored in gender studies in the 1970s are watching their daughters don purdah, nongovernmental organizations that once had hope for India and the backwoods of Pakistan stand by aghast at a rising tide of rape and acid attacks on girls, and Soviet professional women are watching their daughters become escorts. This after Russian women disappeared from top government posts following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Is there a new global problem that has no name, something erupting worldwide since the heady days of the late 1970s?

Last year, in Foreign Policy magazine, the Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy asked, “Why Do They Hate Us?” She was referring to her Egyptian Brotherhood countrymen, who have taken to stripping and beating women who venture into the public square in post-revolutionary Egypt.

But the headline also applies here. The “War on Women” waged against reproductive rights in the USA is kin to the literal war the Taliban wage by blowing up girls’ schools. Seth McFarlane’s boobs song is hardly tantamount to legally sanctioned wife-beating in places like Egypt and Turkey, combat rape orgies in Africa, the Taliban’s heinous crimes against women in Afghanistan, or male sex selection practices in Asia. But all those things exist on a continuum.

How we as a nation react to misogyny elsewhere says a lot about the status of women here. Imagine the outrage if another nation’s laws allowed white people to beat black people inside their homes, or if a Christian country forbade Muslims to drive cars.

But men heap those abuses—and worse—on women in countries represented at the Status of Women conference in Manhattan this week. America does business with almost all of them.

Clearly, we have not exported feminism.

Last week, PBS premiered Makers, a documentary about the history of the American women’s movement. The film shows how rapidly American women’s rights advanced between 1955 and 1975. There’s Dusty Roads demanding that “stewardesses” be able to keep their jobs after they turned 32; there is Kathrine Switzer getting shoved by the organizer of the Boston Marathon for daring to be the first female to run; and there are Bella and Barbara and Gloria, arm in arm, marching in the streets with thousands, banners waving, demanding, demanding, demanding.

Those demanders are grandmotherly now, or gone. The program ends on a downbeat: with former Nixon protégé Monica Crowley and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer talking about how feminism isn’t for them, like Groucho Marx not wanting to be a member of a club that would invite him in.

Today’s feminist fallback position is to bicker and eat its own. Now Sheryl Sandberg is up for a beat-down. If her name were Jack Welch, Ms. Sandberg would be carried around Michael’s Restaurant on a litter for writing a blockbuster telling women how to get rich and powerful. But Maureen Dowd used her Sunday bully pulpit last week to accuse her of using “the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.”

Please.

How did we get to this place where we pick apart our own best and brightest, rather than focusing our energy on gender parity in Congress and the boardroom?

The Makers documentary makes clear that the women’s movement lost its focus trying to nurture differences rather than insisting on three or four basic rights that apply to all women, everywhere. It fell apart under charges of being elitist, not welcoming enough of minorities, the poor, or lesbians.

But women of all classes and ethnicities benefit from equality, a violence-free existence, reproductive freedom and the right to support oneself economically.

Last week’s passage of the Violence Against Women Act was an encouraging step in returning the U.S. to a place of leadership on women’s rights. The act requires the U.S. to make violence against women a diplomatic priority.

But the U.S. remains the only Western industrialized nation not to have ratified CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, sometimes described as an international bill of rights for women.

Countries that ratify CEDAW commit to incorporate principles of gender equality into their legal systems and to abolish all discriminatory laws in their countries. The U.N. ratified CEDAW in 1979, a generation ago, and 187 countries have signed on. America stands with Iran, Sudan and Somalia in not having signed it.

As Zainab Salbi, a global women’s rights leader and founder of Women for Women International, has put it: “American failure to ratify CEDAW at home presents a severe challenge to its credibility in any efforts to promote women’s human rights abroad.”

Last month, new Secretary of State John Kerry pledged in his Senate confirmation hearings to support CEDAW. After three female secretaries of state who could not muster U.S. muscle behind this important issue, it’s about time.

The United States should be a world leader in standing up against the sex-selecting practices in India and China that have led to huge imbalances in the numbers of men in those countries. The lack of women in India, where there are a whopping 37 million more males than females, has been blamed as one of the causes of the recent upsurge in sexual violence in that nation.

Instead, the climate in America is such that when a petition passed around Congress seeking support for women wanting to drive cars in Saudi Arabia, it garnered only 14 signatures—all from female lawmakers.

This year, we pull our troops out of Afghanistan. That’s a good thing, but in negotiating a peace with the Taliban, we leave millions of Afghan women vulnerable to a laundry list of abuses that include publicly accepted beatings, torture and mutilation of women who run afoul of Taliban strictures. Incredibly, the human rights of women are not on the negotiating table, bypassed in favor of our more pressing need to get billions of dollars of equipment safely out of the country.

There is a planet on which a Hollywood boob song might actually be funny. It’s one where women fill half the House and Senate, and half the CEO chairs in the Fortune 500. It’s a world where our government strongly and regularly places sanctions on horrific gender-based human rights violations instead of excusing them on the basis of culture and tradition.

But that’s not the world we live in.

editorial@observer.com

What is news is the silence around last month’s 2013 Human Rights Watch report claiming that the human rights situation in the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is a city-state) “deteriorated rapidly” in 2012.

So far, none of the bastions of Western tolerance have had much to say about that, or, for that matter, the previous annual reports detailing how laborers in the UAE are indentured servants, women have barely more rights than farm animals and political dissent leads directly to jail, sometimes by way of torture.

The details are disturbing.

Women’s rights are basically nonexistent. Like many Islamic nations, the UAE applies Shariah law to women, meaning that women cannot seek adjudication pursuant to a civil code. Rape victims rarely seek justice, and if they do, they are prosecuted themselves. In December, a 28-year-old British woman who claimed she was gang raped by three men in Dubai (another UAE city-state) was prosecuted for drinking without a license. The Supreme Court has upheld men’s right to beat their wives and children. Emirati women can only obtain a divorce through khul’a, a no-fault divorce that requires them to forfeit all financial rights. Emirati females are legally allowed to inherit just one-third of assets while men are entitled to inherit two-thirds. Men, but not women, are allowed to have four spouses. Men can marry non-Muslims; women cannot.

Two prominent human rights lawyers, Mohammed al-Roken and Mohammed al-Mansoori, have been detained for several years, along with judges, teachers and student leaders. Islamist activists simply disappear in detention. Last year, authorities issued a new federal decree on cyber-crime, making it a jailable offense to caricature or criticize the government. In 2011, a lecturer in economics at the Abu Dhabi University of Paris-Sorbonne (also lured to Happiness Island) was arrested for criticizing the government.

Nearly 90 percent of UAE residents are foreigners with limited rights. Many are Bangladeshi immigrant laborers who must work off the fees they are charged to get hired, have no right to organize or bargain collectively and face penalties for going on strike. Worker suicide rates are high.

This milieu would not seem to be the ideal home away from home for professors who teach labor history and gender studies.

But the price was right.

It’s unclear just how much Emirati money flooded Washington Square. Abu Dhabi gave NYU $50 million in the ’00s, but that was only the public, first tender offer. In 2008, Mariët Westermann, the former director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, appointed the first vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) said, “Abu Dhabi is willing to invest in whatever is needed on the Square. They are very committed to the flow.”

NYUAD spokesman Josh Taylor declined to put a figure on the total contributed for The Observer but, referring to the new HRW report, he said: “NYUAD is committed to an environment that ensures academic freedom, thereby providing a context in which students, faculty and staff can engage in the intellectual exploration and analysis of even the most sensitive issues. However, such freedom does not extend to tolerating speech, writing and/or behavior that intentionally demeans others based on gender, race, religion, national origin, disability, and/or sexual orientation. It also does not extend to public defamation, libel or slander. Such behavior runs counter to NYUAD’s educational mission.”

Regarding women’s rights, he emailed us a Tumblr link with several dozen snapshots of NYUAD students holding small signs starting with “Feminism is important because ...”

He said that gender studies is not one of the degrees offered at the Happiness Island campus, but women are not subject to the dress code that prevails beyond its walls.

NYU’s president, legal scholar John Sexton (who cut the Abu Dhabi deal and has earned the nickname “the George Steinbrenner of academia” for his fund-raising and grand vision), is teaching a course in religion and government at Abu Dhabi and commutes between New York and the UAE. About a third of the NYUAD staff consists of New York-based faculty members who fly over (first class) to teach on a monthly basis.

A 2008 New York magazine story on NYUAD revealed off-the-record professorial angst over the collaboration, but faculty members have been mostly silent. It’s a rare voice on the left—especially in the academies—who will take on Islamist censorship and Shariah abuses against women.

This is all the more disturbing since at NYUAD, at least, the chill seems to be getting inside. Last summer, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that NYU’s “researchers in the UAE use caution in broaching topics such as AIDS and prostitution, the status of migrant laborers; Israel and the Holocaust; and domestic politics and corruption.”

Reacting to that, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a Wall Street Journal education writer, penned a piece in The New York Post accusing NYU and other American colleges of “pandering to despots.” The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff picked up her theme and accused NYU’s Mr. Sexton of “despoiling” NYU’s reputation.

NYU professor Andrew Ross, head of the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told The Observer that the faculty plans a vote of no confidence on Mr. Sexton next month, and the Abu Dhabi issue is one reason for it.  “The decision to invest so much of NYU’ reputation in Abu Dhabi was made unilaterally by President John Sexton, and it is one of the factors weighing on the faculty’s desire to pursue a vote of no confidence in him,” he said.

Still, hundreds of NYU’s faculty members have volunteered to work in Abu Dhabi anyway. And why not? Who could resist the lure of large bonuses—in some cases the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s salary—first-class airfare for family and free private school for the kids?

NYUAD aims to have 2,200 undergraduates within the next 10 years. Currently the school has 450 students who pay $65,300 per year, much of it underwritten by UAE financial aid.

While NYUAD has been open for business on Happiness Island since 2010, the Louvre’s opening has been delayed to 2015, and the $800 million deal to bring the Guggenheim there is also stalled, until at least 2017. Frank Gehry’s 90,000-square-foot design, looking every bit like a crazy pile of discarded origami bits, remains a model only. Not a spade of desert sand has been overturned.

Last year, artists and curators signed an online petition threatening to boycott the Goog over the treatment of workers in Abu Dhabi. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born New York artist who was one of the boycott’s organizers, said in a statement. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same kind of respect as those working with cameras and brushes.”

But abused laborers aren’t the only obstacle to a happy marriage between the Goog and the emir. In a Guardian piece last year about the stalled plans, a museum official said the delay provides time to “educate the audience,” in case the art might provoke an “aggressive response” from conservative Emiratis. William Wells, director of the Townhouse gallery in Cairo, told the Guardian that the Guggenheim did not have a signed commitment from Abu Dhabi that there would be no censorship, although the project managers told the paper there was an understanding. Eleanor R. Goodbar, a Guggenheim foundation spokesman, told The Observer that terms of the agreement were confidential.

Last September, independent auditors looking at worker conditions at Happiness Island found that three-quarters of the site’s workers had paid recruitment fees for their jobs, a form of indentured servitude banned under international labor standards.

There is a very good argument to be made for liberal institutions putting down stakes in repressive regimes. They can serve as good bacilli of sorts, implanting ideals of tolerance, women’s rights and free speech in the belly of the beast. But there is no evidence that NYU or the Guggenheim ever insisted on anything like a free speech or women’s rights clause when they sold their brands.

We have (cynically) come to expect American corporations to remain silent on human rights abuses as one dirty cost of global capitalism. When these institutions, desperate for cash in recessionary times, take money (and first-class plane tickets) to expand the global brand without retaining the meaning of the brand, they aren’t much different from Shell, BP or anyone else doing business in the Gulf.

If our strongholds of tolerance and free and open discourse don’t maintain standards vital to our society and to their own enterprises, they are merely selling their souls, and by extension, ours.

editorial@observer.com

But is it really time to uncork the champagne for our future G.I. Janes? Allowing qualified women into combat is a political triumph. But there’s a more insidious problem for women in the military, a misogynistic tradition older than the nation itself: when men go to war, women get raped.

In the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, “military sexual trauma” has been so pervasive it got its own acronym: MST. According to a Defense Department survey in 2010, an estimated 19,000 American servicewomen were sexually assaulted—that’s a stunning 11 percent of the total number serving. Yet, in 2011, fewer than 500 sexual assault cases made it to court martial, and the number of actual convictions and prison sentences is in the low hundreds.

Greg Jacob is policy director at the Servicewomen’s Action Network, one of the organizations that fought for allowing women in combat. SWAN has also been at the forefront of publicizing the outrageous rate of sexual assault in the American military. He said the ban on women in combat has itself helped create a “two-tiered” military that encourages sexual violence against women. “A group of men consider themselves to be warriors and can do any job. And if you can’t do that role, you are considered extraneous or lesser-than, and you have second-class soldiers. Lifting the ban will get rid of that and force the command to treat women equally,” he said.

We can only hope. At Army bases in Iraq, servicewomen were under orders not to use the latrines at night, or if they really needed to go, to have armed guards to protect them—not from the enemy, but from American men who had become predators.

Given that reality, sending more women on remote and dangerous missions simply puts more women at risk. The worst outcome of the lifted ban would be that women may now serve in combat but still fear unpunished rape by a fellow soldier.

This isn’t something the supporters of lifting the combat ban enjoy talking about. Author Helen Benedict, who has spent years covering military sexual trauma, says servicewomen don’t like to admit sexual assault because it makes them appear to be victims. But even those who are not actually assaulted may face egregious levels of sexual harassment and abuse at all levels, especially on remote bases where they are outnumbered by men by orders of magnitude.

Last year, I worked on a project about homeless female veterans in Washington, D.C., New York and Phoenix, and I was stunned to hear so many stories of harrowing sexual harassment and outright assault. These incidents had lasting effects on the subjects’ mental health and ability to function in civilian life. One woman, who had worked as a clerk at a supply warehouse on one of the larger bases in Iraq, recalled being propositioned several times a day during her entire tour of duty by men who begged her to take off her clothes and give them oral sex. Another woman told me she was raped by a sergeant at Fort Hood, in Texas. The Army launched a criminal investigation, but never filed charges because she couldn’t prove that the sex was not consensual. She claimed that one of her commanders told her she would never see justice because “he’s an asset and you’re a liability.”

Mr. Jacob said that lifting the ban is not the sole solution to the military’s sexual assault problems. “The key thing is how you do an integration like this,” he said. “There has to be follow-out in the implementation. As an organization, that is what we will be working on.” For example, he said, even with the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, The Uniform Code of Justice restricts sodomy, meaning that one can be openly gay, but sex is against the law.

What’s clear is that commanders need to start throwing the book at sexual predators in the ranks. Lifting the ban on women in combat is a step in the right direction for women’s rights, but we haven’t yet won half the battle.

Anti-abortion and pro-choice demonstrators argue in front of the Supreme Court during the March for Life January 24, 2011 in Washington, DC.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. That’s a long time—back when contraception meant counting days and pregnant teenage girls were forced to give birth, 40 years was more than two generations.

Forty years means that an issue our grandmothers thought they’d resolved remains on the front burner of American politics, not just unsettled but consistently under attack.

For two generations, women’s politics in America has been defined and limited by this single, Neanderthaloid issue that has absolutely no place in the political discourse of a modern, post-industrial, civilized nation. The threat of illegalizing abortion (and restricting access to and means of birth control) eclipses every other issue of great importance to women—equal pay, gender parity in politics and boardrooms, issues of workplace fairness, employee flextime and affordable child care.

This anniversary is not something to celebrate. It’s time to ask where we went wrong, and how can we put this issue behind us forever. The difficult truth is, the war on abortion benefits Democrats politically, and drums up millions for pro-choice organizations. What’s less clear is whether the Democrats or pro-choice groups have a plan to defend abortion rights on the state level, where they’re under fiercest assault.

According to a Planned Parenthood report, we have just emerged from the two worst years on record for state legislation against women’s reproductive health care. A thousand pieces of anti-choice legislation were introduced after the tea party swept the 2010 elections. Between 2011 and 2012, 136 of them passed. Just to name a few:

• In Mississippi, the state’s last abortion clinic will probably be shuttered because of a new law requiring doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, which hospitals are afraid to grant in the rabidly anti-abortion state. And the state just carried out an unannounced inspection.

• Attacking the licensing of ambulatory clinics, Virginia’s Board of Health voted to require all clinics in the state to comply with strict new building codes. The rules mean that many clinics would need expensive upgrades or could be forced to close entirely.

• North Dakota, a state with such a shortage of females that oil roughnecks pay women $3,000 to strip and serve beer in their houses, is expected to outlaw abortion again.

• In 2011, the Texas legislature defunded family planning by $73 million, meaning that 63 clinics closed, throwing 160,000 Texas women out on the street as far as health care goes.

Some 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Doctors who do perform these procedures operate in an atmosphere of fear, in which only the most ideologically committed dare to continue. Average gynecologists were scared off long ago. Why on earth would one risk the fate of a Dr. George Tiller, or even contend with restrictive red tape, when one can just deliver babies for a living?

The direct beneficiaries of the right-to-life successes are not embryos and fetuses, but Barack Obama, reinaugurated two days before the Roe anniversary without having to pay women back with a single cabinet seat, and the Democratic Party, which can position itself as pro-woman while doing very little about the other issues we care about.

Also coming out on top are pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood, which had a banner year in 2012, pulling in $400,000 in 24 hours after the Susan G. Komen defunding episode in February. Legions of new supporters were identified as the War on Women raged in 2012.

So what’s the plan? I called Planned Parenthood and asked a staff member in Washington whether the group had a coordinated response to the state-level assaults so clearly being organized on the national level by the other side.

What I found was discouraging. Planned Parenthood has representatives in all 50 state capitols, and I applaud them, especially the brave men and women buttonholing jackasses in Baton Rouge. But their primary focus is not on politics, or lobbying, or identifying pro-choice candidates, or marshaling citizen voices to persuade politicians that they will pay for supporting extremist anti-female legislation. (With 70 percent of the population identifying as pro-choice, they can’t be that hard to find.) Without those tools, the pro-choice forces have been and continue to be defensive, not proactive.

The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has affiliate staff in 20 states and tracks anti-choice legislation. But, according to spokeswoman Samantha Gordon, there is no national campaign to head off attacks at the state level, apparently because they are not always predictable. “Anti-choice politicians do not campaign on choice-related issues,” Gordon said. “However, once they assume office, many of them push extreme anti-choice legislation that is out of touch with our country’s values and priorities.”

If the War on Women is going to mean anything more than an election-year slogan, the pro-choice organizations and the Democrats must leverage their new supporters and bushels of cash to stand up to the extremist agenda.

They need a state-by-state plan to organize and shut down extremists on the local level, where they are doing their dirty work, in cities like Jackson, Tallahassee, Richmond and Austin. Only then can we focus our resources and attention on what really matters to women: equal pay, flextime for working parents, equal representation in politics and business, and affordable child care.

Forty years. Time’s up.

Wouldn’t it be great if this were the year we finally stop narrowly missing Armageddons and using the suffix -ocalypse to describe everything from a big snowstorm to an epic pile of dirty laundry? Trouble is, our brains may be irrevocably wired to expect epochal catastrophe at any moment.

We are, after all, an entire generation limned by The End, starting with the nuclear doomsday we consumed along with our baby food, followed by looming global terrorism, suitcase nukes, climate change and bio-terror. All that fear is self-sustaining.

We cringe at the thought of the viral plagues from chickens and monkeys just waiting to destroy us at any time, or of messed-with Mother Nature’s vengeful superstorms. In New York, our metro savoir faire is the only thing that separates us from the Branch Davidians and other survivalists.

We suffer from such bouts of End of Days anxiety that our newspaper of record has seen fit to institute a column called “Age of Anxiety,” where correspondents—including lauded wordsmiths like Pico Iyer—vent their craven fears.

Doom is a huge federal contract business. Our government pays scientists to design computer models mapping the nuclear demise of Manhattan block by block, building by building. We have color-coded terror alerts and airports arranged for maximum paranoia, despite the fact that we are more likely to die on the LIE getting to JFK than on a plane.

Even our kids are being indoctrinated. The Mayan apocalypse was so well-covered last year that our children were already discussing it on the playground and at sleepovers last spring. As the date approached, my 9-year-old put on a brave face and asked me whether there had ever been another equally dire prediction.

I told her what I believe: whenever great change occurs, human beings see signs of the end of the world. And great change is underway. Just 100 years ago, when her great-grandfather was a young man, there were no planes, no telephones, hardly any cars or paved roads, not much electricity or indoor plumbing, certainly no laptops, cellphones, televisions or Xboxes. For him, the end of the world as he knew it happened before his eyes.

Our job is to face up to the challenges presented by the end of the world as we know it, rather than seeing The End of the World altogether. Lots of people are already engaged in this kind of work—for instance, the urban planners in Singapore and the Netherlands, featured in The New Yorker recently, who are helping coastal urban centers deal with rising water.

There are people who see a problem and get up and go at it, no matter how insurmountable it seems. People like Marcus Eriksen, a Gulf War vet who devoted his life to researching plastic pollution in the oceans. Mr. Eriksen sailed the world in a raft made of plastic bottles, founded 5 Gyres, named after the areas in the ocean where massive islands of plastic are accumulating, and is now documenting Japanese tsunami flotsam.

L.A.-based hedge funder Eyal Aronoff co-founded the Fuel Freedom Foundation to begin the long and slow process of reducing American dependence on petroleum. We can’t get rid of our oil addiction overnight or even in the next decades, but we have to start somewhere. Mr. Aronoff’s foundation promotes alternatives to gasoline, such as methanol, a renewable, American-made fuel, along with “flex-fuel” cars that could run on methanol or gasoline. Not surprisingly, the oil companies oppose this, but so too do many environmentalists, whose quest for a green world demands instant change, or, apparently, none at all.

In New Jersey, Kevin Ryan is president and CEO of Covenant House International, one of the largest charities in the world aimed at helping homeless, trafficked and exploited young people find homes. Speaking recently at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side about his book, Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, Mr. Ryan described the tiny things regular people have done to help others.

The charitable act that stuck in my mind was a small one: various people bake a birthday cake every week and bring it to one of the group’s shelters for a kid who may have never had one before. That story motivated me to do something I have never done before. On a cold night in rush hour traffic, I went down to 41st and 10th and spent a few hours dishing out dinner to a couple hundred homeless teens who have called the Port Authority home. A deviation from my usually self-absorbed routine? You bet. Did that act change any lives? Probably not. But it felt like a step in the right direction.

There are people in the world who have never had a birthday cake, not to mention loving parents, a roof over their heads, or decent food, clothing or education. The massive waste of human potential happening in this country through ill-educated kids raised in poverty is the real and only apocalypse of our time. And it’s one we can actually do something about.

I would add our president to the post-apocalyptic thinker list, if only because he refuses to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and forges negotiated compromises that move the meter ever so slightly in the right direction. Did we get universal health care on his watch? No, but Obamacare is going to change millions of lives and, as the right feared, an entitlement has been wedged open. Did he wipe out all tax breaks for the rich last week? No, but the compromise he forged with Mitch McConnell shut down the House Republican extremists, a move toward returning some civility to our politics.

The worst part of millenarianism is the cop-out factor that goes with it, its adherents’ inclination to give up in despair. There’s also something deeply narcissistic in the belief that one’s own end will coincide with the entire world’s.

Maybe the doomsayers were right in one respect. Maybe we needed to be terrified to the core in order to confront and overcome fear. Our first order of business in these post-apocalyptic times: accept the fact that we are going to be here for a while. Then muster the courage and the will to do what we can do, taking small steps to attack big problems.

Illustration by Ed Johnson.

Friday was a day of horror, Saturday a day of shock and Sunday a day of mourning. President Barack Obama hewed to that script when he showed up in Newtown and gave a stem-winder about God and our duty to our children without uttering the word ‘gun’ or stating exactly how he plans to lead us out of this national emergency.

The conventional wisdom said Sunday wasn’t the day, nor Newtown the venue, for policy. I disagree, but I get it. Now, having given his sermon, Mr. Obama should not wait one more day to explain his earthly plan.

That plan should start with the appointment of a Gun Czar. A red state, red-meat Republican with hunting cred, a gun lover who isn’t a gun nut, who can start the serious work that our nation, with 300 million guns in private hands, needs to begin right now.

The Gun Czar should gather a bipartisan room full of the concerned and powerful, from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to pro-gun moderates like New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and even the NRA, and together map out a national strategy to stop these regular community bloodlettings.

The Gun Czar will have his or her hands full dealing with the traditional entitlement of the gun lobby, but must forge on and ignore those who claim it is a joke to try to take on National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre. The conditions are right today to send him the way of Grover Norquist.

The challenges to be faced are political, societal and psychological, and regulatory, and they must be addressed separately and directly.

The political moment is now. Timing is everything in Washington, and there is not a minute to waste. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School is so horrific that even Rupert Murdoch has been begging Mr. Obama to show some leadership on assault weapons. The gallery of dead children has temporarily wiped the smirk off the faces of the NRA lobbyists and sapped the gloat from the weapons dealers.

President Obama should address the nation this week, from the Oval Office, not from a pulpit in Newtown.

His Justice Department has already studied the regulatory part of this conversation, but has so far only whispered about it. According to The New York Times, the Justice Department commissioned a study last year on how to rein in the violence, starting with a stronger background-check system. It recommended things like synching Social Security databases of people receiving mental health disability benefits with the FBI’s gun background check, and increasing to $100 million federal grants to states that share private information with the FBI. The study also suggested that private gun sellers be required to obtain background checks on buyers.

Simple, rational ideas—not even prying the machine guns out of any gun-lover’s cold, dead hands, just trying to make sure they don’t wind up in the hands of maniacs. Who could object? Yet the study was shelved, a piece of election-year cynicism that must weigh heavily on the minds of those who made that decision.

Mr. Obama’s reluctance to say that Second Amendment rights must stop at the doors of our malls and schools is the simpering inverse of the evil Rovian calculus that destroyed the art of compromise for so many years. It is just as shameful and regressive.

There was exactly one single mention of guns in the presidential election debates. During the second debate, Mr. Obama said, “What I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapon ban introduced.”

President Clinton introduced that ban in 1994, but it expired in 2004, and Congressional Republicans refused to renew it. The conventional wisdom on it is that it didn’t work anyway. And the gun lobby used the fact that it had ever even existed to sell more guns.

And sell they did!

Here is where we come to the social-psychological public health part of the challenge. Daunting, maybe insurmountable, but we have no other option than to try.

Nancy Lanza, the laughing, blond suburban mom whose gun collection enabled the Sandy Hook massacre, participated in a national gun ownership surge that, curiously, dates to Mr. Obama’s first election. In the year of the 2008 election, the numbers of American who applied for weapons background checks jumped by more than 1.5 million. In the single month before the last election, in October 2012, the number of Americans applying for background checks, leaped by more than 18 percent.

One reason for the surge is the gun lobby has whipped up its followers to believe President Obama intends to take away their guns. That didn’t happen in his first administration, but with this crowd, paranoia is never far from the surface.

In my humble opinion, there is another, uglier reason why Mr. Obama’s elections have coincided with gun-buying sprees among white Americans, but I leave a discussion of that to another time and place.

Mrs. Lanza is no longer with us to explain what provoked her to start stockpiling weapons in 2009, but one relative and one friend cited fear and insecurity. “She prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told The Chicago Sun-Times.

The worst happened, and she was most certainly not prepared.

Mrs. Lanza liked board games and craft beer and shooting, but also seems to have been afflicted with a need to arm herself to the teeth. When and how the bug hit her, we don’t know. Reports say she started buying guns after her divorce in 2009. She stocked up on so-called tactical weapons. Cop weapons. A Glock. A Sig Sauer. A semiautomatic rifle called an AR-15, the gun of choice for mass killers of late.

These weapons are not intended for bagging deer and squirrels. There’s only one target for a facsimile of a machine gun, and it walks on two legs.

Soon she was taking her guns and her two sons, one of whom she knew to be mentally ill, to the firing range, donning the goggles, taking aim at paper targets on human figures, living the Rambo fantasy.

The shooting ranges up in Connecticut, which welcomed Mrs. Lanza and her child-murderer-in-training, are scurrying for cover now, refusing to talk to reporters, pretending they never saw the smiling blonde and her twisted kid blasting away.

Collecting and shooting these guns, she joined millions of Americans who are not hunters, who live in a nation defended by the greatest killing machine ever invented by mankind, who are mostly well-housed and -fed, and who yet feel so personally threatened that they stock their homes with weapons of the sort found on remote bases in Afghanistan.

At some point, gun ownership in America tipped from being an outdoor hobby for men and the occasional woman who like to hunt deer and blow away skeet, to a pastime as black as the costumes young male maniacs don before they enter malls, schools and theaters.

The growing popularity of tactical weapons is such that within 100 miles of New York, we now encounter giant billboards on highways advertising shops that sell to civilians weapons that by rights and rationality belong only in the hands of trained soldiers and law enforcement personnel—if that.

Not 10 miles from our house in upstate New York, a new tactical weapons shop opened this year, advertising itself on the highway as “Not Your Father’s Gunshop.” The owner, John Kielbasa, an emigrant from New York City, recently told CNN that Mr. Obama’s election was “good for my business,” and bragged that the morning after the election a man walked in and bought two AK-47s.

A half hour away from Mr. Kielbasa’s establishment, on a back road that leads to the local Walmart, another giant billboard advertises yet another shop selling tactical weapons.

These billboards—nestled among roadside ads for real estate and insurance, barely an hour’s drive from New York City—are signs of dark times, to be sure.

Has it gotten as dark as it will get?

The gun control backlashes in the wake of attacks by Jared Loughner and James Holmes and their analogues over the last decade achieved nothing. But now there's hope for real change.

The 2012 election is over and 20 first-grade children are dead, shot multiple times with a gun and bullets that no civilian in America needs in his or her home.

A Gun Czar won’t bring back those children and their teachers, no more than any man or woman or government policy can bring back to life the dead in Aurora or Tucson, or restore the bright, shining abilities of Gabby Giffords, forced by a bullet to the brain to resign rather than represent the people of the great state of Arizona, who so desperately need a leader to help them out of their open-carry Death Cult madness.

A Gun Czar can’t cure the American gun sickness. But like any public health campaign, airing the problem with strong leadership makes people think about and recognize it, and slowly, over time, change their habits.

Think smoking, think AIDS, think obesity.

We can do this.

Please Mr. President: Try.

editorial@observer.com