Self-Defense and Gun Regulation for All Commentary: Gun Control Policy and the Second Amendment: Responses

The importance and universality of self-defense rights are beyond dispute. Self-defense emerged as a major social and constitutional issue in the second half of the twentieth century focused on minorities and women before it provided the primary basis for expansive Second Amendment rights. Supporters of broad Second Amendment rights base them on an individual and collective right to self-defense against attacks by others, but they differ about the source of the danger—the others who are attacking. Professor Nicholas Johnson emphasizes that law-abiding blacks are most at risk and most need guns to defend themselves because of black-on-black violence and the government’s failure to provide safety. He opposes gun regulation, which he considers “disarmament,” and favors armed selfdefense. The import of the common arguments of opponents of gun regulation is that their absolutist understanding of their rights to selfdefense and freedom, their dire perceptions of the perils of government, and their fantasies of the necessity and efficacy of armed resistance to the federal government require the rest of us to live with the open gun market, with its very real and immediate toll of over 30,000 people shot dead a year, and with the usually unspoken normalcy of widespread murder and fear that undermines the quality and tenor of daily life. But there are regulations that would significantly reduce the easy availability of guns to criminals, youth, and mass murderers without interfering with self-defense. Blacks and whites, and everybody else, do not need that open gun market for self-defense. Self-defense and gun regulation can coexist

Remedies for Private Intelligence Abuses: Legal and Ideological Barriers

Surveillance and intelligence activities by private companies and individuals are not new to the United States; the nuclear power industry\u27s resort to such activities poses new civil liberties and social problems. The extreme danger embodied in nuclear facilities and materials and the fear of nuclear terrorism provide the most plausible justification in our history for the wholesale destruction of civil liberties. Ostensibly responding to these dangers, corporate and government agencies have conducted surveillance of and gathered intelligence about opponents of nuclear power. As in the past, the targets of these activities are not terrorists but citizens who nonviolently oppose corporate and government policy: the intent and effect has been not to provide security, but to subvert groups and individuals who seek to change those policies. The emerging question is not merely whether we can tolerate some infringements on civil liberties in the face of a potentially great danger, but whether nuclear power and democracy can coexist. The nature and scope of the nuclear industry\u27s surveillance and intelligence activities have been set out and documented elsewhere. This paper discusses possible legal remedies available to victims of such activities, and after concluding that existing remedies are inadequate, attempts to place the issue in a broader social context

Remedies for Private Intelligence Abuses: Legal and Ideological Barriers

Surveillance and intelligence activities by private companies and individuals are not new to the United States; the nuclear power industry\u27s resort to such activities poses new civil liberties and social problems. The extreme danger embodied in nuclear facilities and materials and the fear of nuclear terrorism provide the most plausible justification in our history for the wholesale destruction of civil liberties. Ostensibly responding to these dangers, corporate and government agencies have conducted surveillance of and gathered intelligence about opponents of nuclear power. As in the past, the targets of these activities are not terrorists but citizens who nonviolently oppose corporate and government policy: the intent and effect has been not to provide security, but to subvert groups and individuals who seek to change those policies. The emerging question is not merely whether we can tolerate some infringements on civil liberties in the face of a potentially great danger, but whether nuclear power and democracy can coexist. The nature and scope of the nuclear industry\u27s surveillance and intelligence activities have been set out and documented elsewhere. This paper discusses possible legal remedies available to victims of such activities, and after concluding that existing remedies are inadequate, attempts to place the issue in a broader social context

Quantifying the limits of controllability for the nitrogen-vacancy electron spin defect

Solid-state electron spin qubits, like the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, rely on control sequences of population inversion to enhance sensitivity and improve device coherence. But even for this paradigmatic system, the fundamental limits of population inversion and potential impacts on applications like quantum sensing have not been assessed quantitatively. Here, we perform high accuracy simulations beyond the rotating wave approximation, including explicit unitary simulation of neighboring nuclear spins. Using quantum optimal control, we identify analytical pulses for the control of a qubit subspace within the spin-1 ground state and quantify the relationship between pulse complexity, control duration, and fidelity. We find exponentially increasing amplitude and bandwidth requirements with reduced control duration and further quantify the emergence of non-Markovian effects for multipulse sequences using sub-nanosecond population inversion. From this, we determine that the reduced fidelity and non-Markovianity is due to coherent interactions of the electron spin with the nuclear spin environment. Ultimately, we identify a potentially realizable regime of nanosecond control duration for high-fidelity multipulse sequences. These results provide key insights into the fundamental limits of quantum information processing using electron spin defects in diamond.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Lymph node ratio is an important and independent prognostic factor for patients with stage III melanoma

INTRODUCTION: The incidence of melanoma is dramatically increasing worldwide. We hypothesized that the ratio of metastatic to examined lymph node ratio (LNR) would be the most important prognostic factor for stage III patients. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed our institutional database of melanoma patients and identified 168 patients who underwent lymph node dissection (LND) for stage III disease between 1993 and 2007. Patients were divided into three groups based on LNR (≤10%, n = 93; 10-≤25%, n = 45; and \u3e25%, n = 30). Univariate and multivariate analysis was performed using Cox proportional hazards model. RESULTS: The median survival time of the entire group of patients was 34 months. The median number of positive nodes was 2 (range = 1, 55), and the median number of examined nodes was 22 (range = 5-123). Tumor characteristics of the primary melanoma (such as thickness, ulceration, and primary site) were not significant predictors of survival in this analysis. By univariate analysis, LNR was an important prognostic factor. Patients with LNR 10-25% and \u3e25% had decreased survival compared to those patients with LNR ≤10% (HR = hazard ratio = 2.0 and 3.1, respectively; P ≤ 0.005). The number of positive lymph nodes also impacted on survival (P = 0.001). In multivariate analysis, LNR of 10-25% and \u3e25% predicted survival (HR = 2.5 and 4.0, respectively). CONCLUSION: LNR is an important prognostic factor in patients undergoing LND for stage III melanoma. It can be used to stratify patients being considered for adjuvant therapy trials and should be evaluated using a larger prospective database