I think I have thought of an approach to gun control that isn’t being discussed in the country at the moment, and might actually get round the usual 2nd amendment problems.
The problem, as we all know, is that the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment makes it more or less impossible to pass a Federal statute banning or even usefully regulating domestic ownership of firearms. If Obama tries to go down that road he will never make any headway. Not even now. The 2nd amendment states:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Seems to me the way to make headway is NOT to try to pass a Federal law banning or regulating firearms in the first instance, but instead to pass a federal law, a lot like a highways bill that says to the states, for instance, if you raise the drinking age to 21 we will give you federal money to maintain your highways. It seems to me that the feds could pass a law that says: we will offer funding to any state that chooses to redefine its laws regulating its state militia, so that the redefined militia not only includes the traditional national guard, but also takes in every legally registered gun owner in the state. Thus the state of Connecticut could pass a law saying we redefine our state militia to include all legally registered gun owners.
These new members of the militia will not be required to provide the kind of service that the traditional national guard members are required to provide, but they will be obliged, as members of the second tier of the state militia, to conform to certain basic gun safety rules. Such as:
1. Gun owners (militiamen) will be obliged to keep their guns, when they are not carrying them on their person, in a locked steel gun safe, access to which is restricted to the legally registered owner only. (A rule like this one, would, it seems, have prevented the boy in Connecticut from taking his mother’s weapons to school to kill her). In the U.K. all registered gun owners MUST have a steel gun safe if they wish to keep their guns at home, and no one is allowed to have access to those guns except the registered owner, and it isn’t a problem and it doesn’t stop anyone who wants to own a gun from owning one.
Obliging people to keep their guns in a locked steel safe when in no way prohibits them from owning guns. It just keeps the guns out of the hands of unregistered gun owners, or strangers & children, etc.
Gun safes are low-tech, and heavy, so it would be easy and profitable to manufacture them domestically. That means more jobs, and profits, for the people who make them and or the people who sell them. Yes it will mean every gun owner has to spend some money on a gun safe, but that is not an unreasonable restraint on firearm ownership. A gun safe won’t cost more than, well, yet another gun or two.
2. As part of the state’s ‘well regulation’ of its militia, the state could limit the types of weapons its militia members could own and keep at home. Hunting firearms would be sacrosanct. Assault rifles, monster clips, RPG’s, would not. I believe, and this is crucial, that a state can pass laws limiting the categories of acceptable guns militiamen can own in order to regulate well its own militia, even when the federal government cannot.
I know Scalia has defined the right embedded in the 2nd amendment as a personal right, but no citizen of Connecticut who could prove him or herself fit to own a gun under a reasonable law regulating well its state militia would be excluded from the state militia. So the right to own guns would be absolutely preserved.
States are even now allowed to forbid firearm ownership to certain classes of persons: felons, insane people, children, for instance. There is no constitutional reason a state could not, as part of its well regulation of its own militia, require gun owners to prove they are fit persons to own guns. Not just at the time of purchase, but, as in the U.K. every five years or so. Which could include, say, a letter from their doctor saying they have not developed any mental health issues that might raise a question about their ability to be responsible gun owners, which could include senility, brain damage, clinical depression, etc. This is common practice in the U.K. It only stops a very few people with severe mental issues from keeping guns, but what a huge leap forward that would be!
If the Feds try to pass such a law directly, they will never manage it, not under the current view of the 2nd amendment, but the States have, as far as I can see, a pretty clear road here. Of course all states won’t bite, but many might. Especially states like Connecticut. The Feds could offer as incentive federal funding to pay for the extra policing involved.
Extra money for police always looks good to state legislators and governors. The Feds could even sweeten the pot with money for victims of gun crime. They could even, for a limited time, say, subsidize the manufacture and purchase of gun safes. Now is exactly the right time to get a bill like that passed, because it would show Congress to be doing something without forcing any State to do anything their legislature doesn’t want to do. Every state is free to say no. But not every state will.
If such a law started to work in even one state, say Connecticut, then other states would almost certainly follow. If we could get even just the bluest states to adopt a law like this, we could be protecting a huge percentage of the U.S. population.
And if it works well, and those early adopter states turn out in the longer term to suffer fewer horrendous gun crimes, while at the same time people see that no one is trying to take anyone’s hunting weapons away, or stopping anyone from defending their homes or their persons with responsibly kept firearms, pressure will mount in other states to follow suite.
Funding could be shifted from the homeland security budget, and from the Defense budget.
How better to make us safer and how better to defend our children?
They’re true innocents in a wicked world and deserve better.
That’s the point; I had a little experience with some pretty severe cases of autism through a girlfriend who was the school (a boarding school) social worker/psychologist a good many years ago. Not something I ever really got to grips with though.
And of course, having been a psychiatric nurse, was quite curious about it. It wasn’t something I’d come across as a hospital psychiatric nurse. There was a 13 year-old in one of the children’s wards who probably was, looking back on it with hindsight, but that would frankly have been the least of his problems anyway.
It is not, emphatically, a mental illness. Or any form of insanity. No more than Downs syndrome as far as I know: and children, young adults and adults with Downs Syndrome even at its most severe are famously gentle.
So I totally fail to understand this talk of this man’s mother supposedly wanting him ‘committed’. Unless the rules in the USA are very, very different. But misconceptions like that are very handy for many people in these circumstances, aren’t they?
99 Luftballons:
I’m not on very solid ground here, but I don’t think graphic unreal violence, however gory, would actually have any psychological influence at all in the way you mean. Not if he was simply autistic or suffering from Asperger’s.
Squirrel:
I think this kid had a variety of problems, and his paranoid recluse mother tried to deal with them alone, and possibly with her own head crammed with odd notions – and then, finally realizing the utter failure of her scheme, was desperately trying to commit him before he lashed out.
And, failed at that, too.
No, Asperger’s is not a reason by itself to commit someone, so far as I know.
There must have been other things going on.
Squirrel
I know two couples (who don’t know each other) here who each have a severly autistic son in his late teens. Both these boys were difficult for both couples to look after on their own, through childhood, but now both have, despite all the love and effort you could imagine, really awe inspiring devotion, have had to look for places in boarding/live-in schools/care facilities, because both couples can no longer cope. Both boys have just become physically too strong for them. It’s all fine when things are quite, but if either of them loses his temper, which happens with all teenagers from time to time, and possibly more often with both these boys, because they experience perhaps different kinds of frustration. Both sets of parents at times have been sincerely afraid. Also they can never ever leave the boys alone.
I know another couple who are a bit older, and their severely autistic son is also older, but in his late teens he frightened them a lot in the same way, but now he’s past adolescence has settled down, enough even to work and take care of his own flat, in a sheltered, but really excellent facility, that gives the residents as much autonomy as they are comfortable with, but also helps them cope with stuff that might challenge them too much.
The very notion of giving firearms training to any one of those three young men is inconceivable, though. In fact it would border on criminal.
Kev:
I just had a quick look at Greenwaldistan. I see. Hmm. I’ve pretty well abandoned trying to work out how most of them think. I suspect they’re all Carry On Conspiratorialists.
(You know: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”)
However they dress it up fancily. And Greenwald has spent all his time at the Grauniad now feeding them their opportunities.
You think one of them is showing some kind of sense for a short while, and then suddenly, Wham! They jump the rails. I do hope they don’t have lots of guns.
FFS, there was a documentary on C$ here years and years ago, complete with architect’s drawings, research and simulations from (forget what it’s called, but the people who do research into the effects of fires on buildings here).
It was quite obvious how and why, and what the architectural feature was that was the main reason, those damn buildings collapsed.
But the Kurtz’s and the others are the same kind of people who, one night in London, insisted to me they’d seen mysterious lights in the sky and they must have been UFO’s.
I was actually invited to the party that night at the Roundhouse in Camden for a TV music channel launch, so I knew they were actually a large number of very powerful searchlights reflecting from cloud from around the Roundhouse . .
Stunningly powerful actually; I hadn’t known there were that many around. I asked the organisers, and they said they had actually grabbed all the ones that were in the UK and a handful from across the Channel as well, for that night
It only occurred to me later that probably only people in their 60′s had ever seen searchlights doing that. But that, I thought, was still no excuse. But what can you do?
(Sq. must to bed shortly. Getting his spine injected into again tomorrow morning for Christmas! Odd sort of Chrissie prezzie from the NHS, I know, but there we are. . . All paws firmly crossed in the hope the Prof of Neurosurgery doesn’t see any more bloody problems than he did last time on the X-rays. Can’t eat, can only drink water as of now. Nearly forgot that. Off to eat my pear; just got time, I think. No coffee in the morning. That’s desperate.)
We’re all rooting for you Squirrel, or rubbing our nuts, or whatever squirrels do to call upon the bushytailed gods for best of luck.
Squirrel:
thanks for that.
And as always, my best wishes on your personal travails. I wonder at how well you maintain a sense of humor through all this. Your courage inspires.
Ta, folks!
Think I’ll try to get a squint at the bottle before the Prof puts the needle in, just to make sure it doesn’t say “Made in the USA by a dodgy rat-infested cheapo compounding pharmacy” on the label though
I get free tea and bikkies afterwards, too. (Proper tea and bikkies, what the nurses have.) And I get petted by the nurses a bit, too, usually. (I reacted terribly badly to an aneasthetic once, it was a bit of a disaster, so they look after me.)
If all goes well, should be quite a perky squirrel again by Sunday.
“So a question. These violent video games and movies are distibuted worldwide, so why are
incidents like Newtown not more prevalent outside of the USA”?
That’s a good question gryff.
First off, I think each incident has to be viewed independently, although, in the cases where the murderers committed suicide(either ‘by cop’ or at their own hand) I believe, as is the case with most suicides, that a lot of the motivation is to punish those left behind or, in some cases, society as a whole.
After a google, I learned that Harris and Klebold of Columbine infamy played DOOM(and a couple of other violent games) , a game which was banned in Germany in 1994. Apparently, after that tragedy, some debate was had about the effects of violent video games and sparked a lawsuit by the parents of one of the victims against the manufacturers of those games as well as against the producers of a movie which may have given the killers some prompting.
Other situations have provoked similar reactions.
All such lawsuits, to date, have been thrown out. Here’s the link from which I’m drawing these details: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game-violence2.htm
None of the related research appears conclusive. The results of one study: “One of the most recent studies, conducted in 2006 at the Indiana University School of Medicine, went right to the source. Researchers scanned the brains of 44 kids immediately after they played video games. Half of the kids played “Need for Speed: Underground,” an action racing game that doesn’t have a violent component. The other half played “Medal of Honor: Frontline,” an action game that includes violent first-person shooter activity (the game revolves around the player’s point of view). The brain scans of the kids who played the violent game showed increased activity in the amygdala, which stimulates emotions, and decreased activity in the prefrontal lobe, which regulates inhibition, self-control and concentration. These activity changes didn’t show up on the brain scans of the kids playing “Need for Speed.”
Make of that what you will. After further perusing related information, it’s clear there is plenty to support both the pros and the cons to this argument – which adds balance, if viewed independently.
But, as one mitigating factor among many, I wouldn’t out of hand dismiss these concerns. Old fashioned, I admit that I am. Aside from Wii games(which necessitates physical activity), video games are not allowed in my home. As far as I’m concerned, time can be better spent reading, or being creative or playing outside. Since I don’t anticipate my children guiding drones for the DOD, I don’t see any benefit to sitting in front of a screen playing games. To be honest, though, my kids probably spend too much time watching TV, but then my wife could probably be accused of the same trait and in my defense, my fifth grader just told me she placed second in her grade on a geography test and she’s now qualified fora spot in the regional Geography Bee.
Anyway, back to the topic and while I’m certainly no NRA member and in full recognization of the recourse said supporters will find in making the suggestion, I do believe it’s too counter-intuitive to suppose that a young person constantly exposed to the violent, graphic images portrayed in the type of video games I see advertised on the telly is not negatively affected.
But, as always, it’s just my opinion – which, along with fifty cents, won’t even buy you a Snickers bar.
99 Luftballons thanks for your reply, your thoughts and the link (one which I didn’t have). I feared I might get some “Mark of Cain” on this blog for questioning the role of violent video games in incidents like Newtown.
And I don’t dismiss these concerns. For reasons totally unconnected with Newtown, over the last six weeks I have had a number of conversations with a young man who plays Call of Duty (amongst other games)about why he plays them, what he gets from them etc.
I would really like to see more research on the issue. There was a report from Congress in 1999, but with the rapid changes in graphic hardware and software I’m not sure it is relevant anymore.
What I am worried about is the NRA saying “guns don’t kill people, people do“.
Then claiming that Adam Lanza was “mentally ill”, influenced by “violent video games” and his mother was a poor parent. And I fully expect that to be part of the NRA response.
Japan has many violent video games produced for the home market that maybe even more violent than those in the US and other english-speaking countries (and particularly including sexual violence) yet has a much lower incidnce of murder using guns than just about every country.
How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths
And a much lower incidence of rape than most countries(though there maybe of course a cultural issue around reporting such crimes).
And I agree – although video gaming is not without its creative elements.
Nadolig Llawen i gyd. (In English – Merry Christmas to all.)
gryff
Gryff
And the same to you.
I had guessed that might be what it was, but went to google translate to check, and lo and behold they got it right. Even detected the language before I had time to help.
Here’s a reply, translated from the English into Welsh by GT. Having seen the way Google can mangle English to Spanish translations sometimes, I’ll be curious to know if it makes any sense at all;
I’m guessing that’s Welch – is that correct.
Anyway, thanks for prompting me to awaken my lovely children with an alarm consisting of humpback whale song.
Yeah, Welsh it is, niner.
I could no more pronounce any of that than fly to the moon, but the spoken language is actually quite musical and lovely. I had a Welsh friend in college who was fluent, and from whom I learned a few cusswords, just phonetically. No idea how you spell them.
Gunny,
I see. So “Nadolig Llawen i gyd” is the ultimate gambit in the War on Christmas, then: pretending to endorse “Merry Christmas” while rendering it literally unspeakable. Fiendish.
If someone in Wales tries to wiggle out paying off a bet, do they say he is trying to English on it?
Squirrel’s back! (Ahem.) New consultant for this one; incredibly beautiful (and tall, over 1.90!) young woman this time. Prof doing something urgent to an in-patient apparently. Sq aching where anaesthetic and the gunge went in (“I was being generous for Christmas,” she said) and mildly dopey still but haven’t needed my ‘superdrug’ for a whole 12 hours now.womderful!
Friend just rang to check Sq still OK; noted the sad inevitability that the NRA’s answer to a lot of people with a lot of guns is more people with more guns.
99 Luftballons
December 20, 2012 at 5:14 pm
I am reminded of when I was small. In those days in the UK we didn’t have TV. We could only afford the movies a couple of times a year.
I must have been around eight and dad persuaded us to go to a movie with a western as the ‘B’ picture.
I was fine until the Indians attacked the wagon train and some poor woman fell to the ground with an arrow sticking out of her chest…
It was the most awful thing I’d ever seen. It felt real. It was real. I made them take me home there and then much to dad’s disgust, but it was the first time I’d ever seen anyone ‘die’ even though I was a sensible child and knew it was pretend. [I hate Westerns to this day]
Today our kids are subjected to horrific sights via TV and Computer games. I don’t care what the producers and those that make money from them say, it hardens our little ones, there’s no doubt about it
Squirrel says:
December 21, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Squirrel’s back! (Ahem.)
Good! Here’s hoping you have a fantastic pain free Christmas and New Year and continue feeling better.
All the best to our fine furry pal. Hope that shot takes hold, and that the tall one was thirsty for a pint.
On a separate off-topic (whatever that means, around here!) line, I was thinking of BimBallace a while ago.
Our local McD’s have brought back that yummy culinary masterpiece, the McRib.
Seven inches of fat, enclosed in their airy bread, how can one resist!
Kev:
Ah. Happened to overhear one of the radiographers ask. (The tall girl was a consultant: must be very, very bright indeed, she can’t be older than her late twenties and she’ll have already done seven years degree and hospital residency to get even close. A friend’s son got his FRCS when he was 25, and didn’t become a consultant until recently in his early thirties and that was reckoned to be pretty good progress.) She’d been at another hospital apparently and got married last year . . .
And I did get petted by one of the nurses . . .No bikkies though; they’d been given a cake, and by time I was recovering, the entire department had heard, been through and snaffled the lot. (There was a third left when I went into the sterile room —Sq notices these things!—but when I came out 40 minutes later, it was all gone.)
It really is amazing, though, the kit that’s around. I only did basic physiological stuff when I trained, but the gear was bloody dark ages by comparison. I wouldn’t have a clue how to work eighty per cent of it now. I don’t think I’d even be able to turn on the oxygen. The ‘crash trolley’ I knew of old (and had to sprint like hell with between wards) is long gone. . .Most of it’s all built into the walls by every bed now.
I don’t know how on earth we ever managed to stop patients dying all the time. (Well, reasonably often.) Got shown the syringe and needle, too. They let me watch it all on one of the X-ray monitor screens this time, being a regular customer now.
About 8cm long and thicker than a darning needle. (It goes in through an even thicker sleeve to guide it.) They haven’t managed to miniaturise that, yet.
I’m very fond of my NHS. Sorry about the enthusiastic little rant.
Ah, the supremely healthy MacFood. . .I goi told off for asking for three sugars in my coffee. But Sq has a good beguiling forlorn pleading smile when necessary, so I got them. . .
Our music topic this week is Songs About Hands. One of my contributions was Green Day’s Longview. Our esteemed collegue from Nevada had this to say (not Kevin, another American)
Pornstar, well I should think so too. Walmart’s perfectly right. Music is a weapon of mass destruction. Look what a few trumpets did to Jericho.
They ought to know a hot, sweet cup of tea is good for what ails you
Or coffee !
I’d advise airing Max Bygraves recording of ‘You Need Hands’.
Guaranteed to trigger mass suicide of the unhinged. Problem solved
Di
Oh my god. I have very vague memories of that, but just the mention of it and I could hear that sort of Essex-Cockney sanctimonious tone in my head instantly.
And up to then it was Bach’s ‘Jauchzet, frohlocket’ I listened to earlier on R3 (It was a recording from this afternoon quite near home, too, wish I’d been there, but still, the Sq epidural was more important, I suppose) that was happily sitting in my head.
Now look what you’ve gone and done!
Di -
I actually put up the Sex Pistols’ version of You Need Hands. But Longview is about wanking, and who knows what horrors that might instill in any young minds looking to accidentally find Dookie under the holiday tree.
In fact, every young man should have a copy of Dookie under the holiday tree. If they had a proper wank every now and again, they might not feel the need for an AR-15.
All I could think of Squirrel was “I wanna tell you a story.”
Glad that you are still in fine fettle.
Don’t know Green Day. Had a quick listen to ‘Oh Love’; almost folky.
Looked up the lyrics of Longview . . .(eventually found one without asterisks [!]) They’re that ‘controversial’?
Sq very much out of touch, now; managed to give up reviewing rock music and stuff a few years ago and swore to myself I’d never do it again.
Had to do it under a pseudonym ‘cos I was known more for classical music, but it was tough going. Especially as I had to use a completely different style. Nobody ever cracked the pseudonym though (and haven’t yet) to my amazement, not even my own magazine’s graphics/layout guy who typeset everything I wrote.
Weird experience, colleagues from other mags and sometimes musicians talking to me about something I’d written without knowing it was me . . .
It’s been years now, but I still can’t actually listen to any without panicking about how I’d write about it at 1 or 2 in the morning . . .
Apparently so, to the Walmartian guns’n'bible crowd anyway.
Some genuinely lovely songs about wanking posted this week though. Wonder if Walmart sells those.
Expat, ta.
Perking up nicely. After a really horrible three months. Christmas isn’t cancelled after all, will be busy now getting everything sorted for the Squirrel Christmas Dinner Party. Which I’ve been late doing anything about, not sort of wanting to tempt fate.
I had to be kept in for a weekend once at this time of year, and since they were sending everyone they could home for Christmas, and closing down the old Victorian wards as they did, I had an entire brand new ward all to myself. (Actually, I had the entire new annexe to myself. All six storeys of it. Took the kitchens ages to work out where I was to deliver the food. It kept getting lost.)
They hadn’t even installed a telly or anything yet, so my only entertainment was watching out of the window (they used a different hospital for this then) which looked over Wormwood Scrubs prison of all places, hoping to catch sight of someone scarpering over the wall like that spy.
(Friend been issued tonight with long-ish—and heavy—shopping list for tomorrow, since I’m supposed to take things very easy for a couple of days.)
Pornstar:
Ah. I understand, example of penis envy. (Male variety.)
And so to bed . . .
(Especially as this captcha thing is making me try about five times to get anything through today.)
Sadly Madam it has happened here before and could easily happen again tomorrow. We are not immune.
1991 Bennington Eveready Plant Shooting
Squirrel;
Yeah. I ramped up the ‘difficulty’ level to cut down the Christmas spambots, some of whom (which?) have figured out how to register. About 20 a day until I boosted it. Over 50,000 spam items caught in the filters since this show went on the road a couple of years ago.
Do people really buy Uggs and fake designer crap, not to mention Viagra, by way of this blizzard of shit? I swear, I don’t get it.
For heaven’s sake register and log in, squirrel, then you won’t have to fool with the damn thing at all.
Good to hear you’re bushy-tailed once more. Very good.
OK, OK. I gave in. I registered. (Though I have a deep-seated reluctance to register for anything.)
In thecourse of doing it though, I discovered that Yahoo! no longer recognises a ‘.co.uk’ as a ‘valid email address.’ It kept insisting I had to be a dot com. So I can’t now forward emails from it unless it’s to a bloody dot com address. Not .fr, not even .co dot.uk. Incredible!
FFS, my professional email address is a dot co uk, quite deliberately. As is my private one. I do not want to be a dot com. And I am not going to be just for bloody Yahoo.
Squirrel:
Very glad to read that the tail is bushy again.
And yes, if folks would just focus on a bit of fun now and then, we would have less violence. A few more hugs would do the trick too.
I won’t be around for a few days, my Mom lives nine hour’s drive away and we’re going there very early Tuesday, for a few days.
Amazing. Just turned the news on for a few minutes (been commanded to make chocoloate mousses for tonight) and . ..
Fir in New York State; two firefighters killed,two wounded by automatic gunfire (or semi-automatic, whatever, it;s a stupid bloody gun). And nearby residents being evacuated in an armoured personnel carrier.
Meanwhile, apparently, over 30,000 gun nuts have signed a petition demanding the deportation of Piers Morgan for being against guns, and presumably being rude about the NRA?
Oh what the hell. So you don’t just need guns in schools, guns on school buses, but armed firemen and armoured personnel carriers too now, to ‘protect people’? And there was Sq making a sour joke not long ago about bussing kids around in Warriors?
Must be all the lead in those bullets that screws up people’s brains.
Squirrel,
Which is precisely why our newest mental health advocacy agency, the NRA, insists that Teflon coated bullets, which can pierce any known body armor, be made available to all gun owners.
Hard to have much of a problem with that. Where do I sign up?
Oh no, that can’t be it. There have been all kinds of regulations in the last couple of decades requiring lead be substituted for other materials in both bullets and shotgun pellets. Don’t let it be said the US isn’t safety conscious.
No lead? Well, at least the wildlife won’t get poisoned. . .er . . . Oops. Sq here may possibly not really be connecting here . . .
Off soon to Christmas Eve dinner. See you all later sometime.
Anybody else have these arguments?
Best friend’s husband, who can be very irritatingly English sometimes, dropped hints, again, about having Christmas dInner at lunchtime. A loathsome idea. I always hated people eating furiously and then being incapable and snoring until the end of Boxing Day.
Since Sq is cooking Christmas dinner, paws were firmly dug in and teeth bared and it will be dinner. As in evening.
However, his wife and have compromised again. We both prefer opening prezzies continental style on Christmas Eve; but we have agreed to open them with the Prosecco before dinnner on Christmas Day instead.
We go through this every bloody year.
Squirrel and all:
Update on that nasty story from western NY State. The shooter apparently set the damned fire to lure in his local volunteer firefighters, so he could shoot them.
This is nasty on a scale that I cannot comprehend.
In small towns here in the US, most firefighters are volunteers, folks in the community who sign up to protect their towns and people. It is one of the glorious traditions here, one of the best things about this country.
***
As for the argument: we simply open prezzies on Christmas Eve, accompanied by fine dry salami and good dry red wine, with appropriate cheeses. This tradition started when I was a kid, and my Indian spouse thinks it is really cool.
Anyone trying to change it would run into a united front.
You’ve all got it wrong.
You leave your stocking or half a pair of tights on the end of the bed on Christmas Eve, and Santa comes down the chimney and fills it up. If you’re very lucky, he’ll fill a pillow case too!