The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: The NRA's Long Love-Hate Relationship with the Police

This post originally appeared on The Trace.

When the National Rifle Association convened its annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, this month, its leaders stressed to the event's more than 80,000 attendees how much is at stake in the upcoming presidential election. They urged members to rally behind Donald Trump in defense of gun rights, but also to reverse national trends that the NRA finds disturbing. The most unsettling transformation: increased scrutiny of law enforcement, urged on by the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of several police shootings of black men.

"Can you imagine growing up in a country where everyone from movie stars to the president tells you to be suspicious of police officers?" Chris Cox, the group's chief lobbyist, asked a crowd of thousands in the Kentucky Exposition Center's Freedom Hall. "Everything we've always known to be good and right and true has been twisted, perverted, and repackaged to our kids as wrong, backwards, and abnormal."

Next up on the stage was NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who characterized the call for greater police scrutiny in a similar vein as his understudy: as a symptom of the nation's moral decay. "You're here in this room because you care about the America we all know and that we all cherish," he said. LaPierre then offered a roll call of the salt-of-the-earth types that make up the NRA's base. It began with, "We're the police officers who patrol neighborhoods."

The NRA has latched on to law enforcement officers as potent symbols of group identity ahead of an election it says is an us-versus-them fight for the soul of America. Police are embattled, criticized by a movement led by a younger generation for how they use force. As the NRA tries to mobilize its older, white, rural, and suburban members, it sees an opportunity to cast itself as a champion for police in this fight.

But there is an irony to the gun group's campaign: Cops often oppose NRA-backed policies.

"Most of the gun laws the NRA opposes, like uniform background checks, are strongly supported by the police," Robert Spitzer, a professor of history at SUNY-Cortland and author of Politics of Gun Control and Guns Across America, told The Trace. "And the NRA's whole notion of average citizens carrying guns to thwart crime is vehemently opposed by nearly all police."

The rift between the NRA and law enforcement was ripped wide open in the 1980s. As crime in urban centers soared, police asked Mario Biaggi, a New York congressman and former police officer, to introduce a bill banning teflon-coated "cop killer" bullets designed to pierce body armor. Biaggi's bill took five years to pass. The NRA opposed it until certain provisions that sought to penalize stores that sold such bullets were watered down. Around the same time, over the opposition of law enforcement, the gun group lobbied for laws that eased restrictions on interstate transfer of guns.

The NRA has continued to push for policies that law enforcement officials oppose. In Georgia, the state police chief's association opposed sweeping 2014 legislation that dramatically expanded the places where concealed weapons license holders can take guns. Frank Rotondo, the association's director, said his officers did "not want more people carrying guns on the street."

In February, Ken Winter, the head of the Mississippi Police Chief's Association said that a push by the state legislature to dismantle the state's gun licensing system "would put law enforcement officers and all Mississippians directly in harm's way."

Beat cops have also spoken out against attempts backed by the NRA to loosen gun laws. The head of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, a union that represents patrolmen, called a permit-less carry bill passed by the legislature earlier this month "ludicrous."

When NRA leaders say they stand with police, that doesn't mean they are reconsidering their support for campus carry or permit-less carry, Spitzer said. It is, instead, an election year tactic deployed by the gun group to motivate its members. "The pro-police message plays well to their base, and is doubly useful at a time of the Black Lives Matter movement and the reaction against police excesses," he explained.

A poll released in September 2015 by right-leaning public opinion firm Rasmussen found that 58 percent of likely voters believe there is a "war on cops," and 60 percent believe criticism of police hinders actual law enforcement (that's despite the fact that last year was one of the safest ever for police).

Based on conversations with NRA members approached outside the convention hall, the message that police must be protected from scrutiny has resonated. Don, a Louisville native and NRA member who declined to give his last name, said he agreed with NRA leaders that police critics were out of line. "If I had to do job and put up with the shit they put up with, I might bust a couple people in the mouth too."

Cheryl Essner, an NRA member from Dodge City, Kansas, said she was glad to hear the NRA speaking out for police. "If the NRA isn't behind our police officers, who's going to be?" she said. Police "put their lives on the line every day for the people that holler that they're too brutal. But the only reason they're brutal is the people they're trying to protect are."

When the NRA talks about support for law enforcement, they don't mean every agency. Those at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the agency the enforces federal gun laws, are viewed as the enemy. At the leadership forum, LaPierre warned members that a Hillary Clinton White House would "put the full weight of a weaponized IRS, ATF, Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and every other federal agency behind a tax on groups and people they don't like."

This screed echoed the NRA leader's explosive comments from the mid-'90s, when the ATF investigated a rising wave of violent right-wing extremism that led agents into a series of bloody standoffs. In a 1993 fundraising letter, LaPierre decried ATF agents as "jack-booted government thugs."

In Louisville, police are contending with the consequences of the NRA's lobbying power. In late March, Chief Steve Conrad told local reporters that the city's streets are flooded with an increasing number of guns because the unregulated private market makes weapons available to anyone. The NRA has long opposed expanding the background check system to cover these transactions.

Conrad said his city is less safe as a result. "Anybody can sell a gun to anybody they want," he said. "There's no records check, there's no I.D. I want to say we can meet in the parking lot or your office and I can sell you a gun, and that is not illegal."

This article was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow The Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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The New Program Keeping High School Kids Caught with Weed Out of Jail

Pressie Tyner, lead NYPD school safety agent (SSA) for the Stevenson campus that includes Millenium Art Academy in the Bronx. Photo by the author

Making his way through the halls of Millenium Art Academy high school in the Bronx early this past school year, Benvenuto Ferron spotted one of his students, a senior, through the window to the gym. The assistant principal approached the teenager, who was huddled with a few other kids he didn't recognize, and quickly noticed the smell of marijuana.

"I thought I was going to get locked up, expelled from school or something," the student remembers thinking as Ferron walked him to the dean's office. But instead of entering New York City's dystopian criminal justice system, the teenager was alternately shocked and relieved to learn he was getting a "warning card."

"I don't know where the warning card came from, I had never heard of it," the student tells VICE. "I was like, 'What?'"

NYPD School Safety Agents (SSAs) in Bronx schools handed out nearly 700 court summonses—a.k.a. orders to appear before a judge—to students in 2012, accounting for a disproportionately large share of the city-wide total. That June, a group of parents organized a hearing with the NYPD and the city's Department of Education (DOE) to address the problem. It took a few years, but the Warning Card Project is the end-result of that burst of parental activism.

For now, the Project is just a pilot program at five Bronx high school campuses (which house dozens of schools) that use warnings instead of court summonses for two kinds of infractions: pot possession and disorderly conduct. But if proven effective, the program could gain traction across the country amid rising national scrutiny of how school cops discipline kids.

The key difference between a summons and a warning card? Cards don't give you a criminal record, which matters when you're applying for college, housing, or a job later on.

A summons can even impact your right to stay in the country.

On a typical day, several school safety agents sit at the entrance of the Stevenson campus in the Bronx's Soundview neighborhood. One watches a flat-screen monitor with feeds from several hallways, zooming in on images of blurry students every so often to get a closer look. Another is posted up next to the metal detector. He closes his eyes, clasps his hands in his lap and extends his legs out, waiting for students or visitors to scan.

Latisha Weeks, a secretary at Bronx Compass High on the same campus, says her's is a "scanner school"—which is to say one marked by a noticeable focus on security.

"Most of our kids come from tough homes, so when they arrive at a scanner school like this, they feel like they are being watched," she says as we walk down the hall. "They arrive and feel like they've already done something wrong."

The traditionally strict school discipline approach has come under fire in recent years for contributing to the "school-to-prison pipeline," policies critics say push at-risk kids from school into America's sprawling criminal justice system, where just one summons can be the start of a nightmare.

"Thousands of people miss their court date every year," says Molly Kovel, legal director of the Civil Action practice at the Bronx Defenders. "The whole weight of the system can fall on them." According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, there are currently more than 1 million active warrants in NYC, and many of them target young people.

For his part, Millenium Art Academy's principal, Herman Guy, attended a Warning Card Project training last summer, and had doubts about the program when it was rolled out during the fall. But he's warmed up to the new approach after seeing it in action.

"I had reservations as to where that line was going to be drawn on the severity of an offense," he tells me. "Now that I understand that it's not a 'get out of jail card' for any offense, it's just those minor mistakes that teenagers being teenagers will make. In many cases is enough to turn the student around."

School safety agents caught a different student with a small lead pipe during morning scanning at the same campus this year, and he was sent to Dean Jessica Flores's office. Flores and the agent involved decided to give the student a warning card.

"He had it for defense, he had been jumped several times," Flores recalls. "The majority of our kids are responding to levels of trauma. If you look at a kid in that light and you work with the child like a human being, you start to see it differently."

The dean says the Warning Card Project is a welcome shift away from stiff penalties for bad behavior. But she concedes schools still have a long way to go. "I think it's a good step in the right direction, but I don't know if it's enough," Flores says. "I hope they're not like, 'OK, we're good now, there's no prison pipeline.'"

As one might imagine, there are critics of a new, less punitive approach among teachers and at least one union official, Teamsters Local 237 President Gregory Floyd, who told the New York Post, "This type of turning your back on illegal behavior is grooming criminals." (Floyd's union represents school safety agents.) The tabloid suggested some city teachers fear kids can "get away with anything" and raised the specter of violence by unruly teens.

But Anne Gregory, an associate professor at Rutgers University who researches school environments, says initiatives like the Warning Card Project are popping up in school districts throughout the United States.

"There is movement to transform the SSAs' role and have them be more focused on safety related incidents and not minor behavior," she explains.

It's a small sample size, but in the last three months of 2015, the number of court summonses handed out in Bronx schools decreased by 60 percent compared to the same time period in 2012. More promising still is that summonses for marijuana possession dropped by nearly half to 9 from 16 during the same time period in 2014, and summonses for disorderly conduct dropped 64 percent from 36 to 13. According to Mark Rampersant, head of the DOE's Office of Safety and Youth Development, there has been just one case of recidivism in the 2015-2016 school year, in which a student has received two warning cards. He says the city is looking to expand the program next academic year.

In deciding whether to give the teenager Assistant Principal Ferron caught with weed a warning, Pressie Tyner, the lead NYPD agent for the Stevenson campus, considered that he was a transfer student who'd never been in trouble before.

"You're not the first develops a community based system. We aren't seen as the enemy anymore."

If the student had brought weed to school a year ago, he would have received an automatic court summons—and might have never recovered.

"Without the warning card, I wouldn't have been able to do half the things I did this year: go to the senior trip, play on the basketball team," the student says. "I didn't think I was going to be able to do anything. I thought I was going to be looked at as a bad student. But it was the opposite way around. This actually helped me to do better."

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We Talked to ‘Warcraft’ Director Duncan Jones About the Problem with Game Adaptations

Hollywood has now perfected its formula for plundering superhero stories, and it's not just the stereotypical comic book guys who line up to throw their money away on sub-par adaptations anymore. The box office doesn't lie: the world has embraced the fantastical universes of Marvel and DC. But not so game stories. To put things into perspective, the biggest opening weekend of a game adaption, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, only made marginally more in its opening weekend ($48.2 million) than Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour ($31.1 million). The Tomb Raider film achieved a Metacritic score of 33. Hannah Montana trumped it with 59.

So, is there an innate problem with video game adaptations? "There's no good reason for it," says Duncan Jones, the director of Warcraft (or Warcraft: The Beginning in some territories), a new movie based on Blizzard's gaming series. It's the third major motion picture for Jones, the son of late musician David Bowie, following 2011's Source Code and 2009's lo-fi sleeper hit Moon. "If you have a good story to tell and intriguing characters, you can make a good movie." So why do movies based on games seem to find the transition between mediums so difficult? One way to look at it is as a generational issue: many of today's aging film critics and most-established directors simply did not grow up with games. Not in the way that Jones did.

"I've played the Warcraft games for 20 years," he tells me, "right from the very first real-time strategy games. I started with Orcs and Humans (the original Warcraft game, released in 1994), back when there was a turf war between that game and Command & Conquer. Over the years, more and more directors will have grown up playing games. Right now there are less of us, but it'll improve."

But how does Jones aim to make it right, and how did he get this opportunity in the first place? Obviously getting the green light to direct the first film adaptation of a franchise as big as Warcraft—still a billion-dollar business, with the card game Hearthstone pulling in around $20 million a month—isn't as simple as having a level-100 orc shaman and knowing your Illidan from your Sargeras. And it certainly wasn't an easy ride for Spider-Man and The Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, who was attached to the project and worked on the script before Jones came onto it.

"He has the right sense of fun and energy," Jones says, "but I just think his vision, and that of Blizzard, didn't mesh. I went in and said, 'For me it's 50/50, with heroes on both sides.' The fact I was a fan meant my natural inclination was more in line with what Blizzard were looking for."

Duncan Jones, photograph via Legendary Pictures

Blizzard has had "20 years of successfully telling stories and a very vested interest in making sure their franchise is protected," so theirs is a pretty entrenched vision. Beneath the cartoony, deformed visuals, the Warcraft lore has always been pretty savage. Main characters and knights in shining armor die (or worse), and innocents are slaughtered in droves. Yet it's also super colorful and has magic that turns you into a fluffy sheep. There's a fine line to find, then, when beginning to turn a deeply detailed video game series spanning two decades into two-hour movie designed for passive consumption, then. And all the while, whoever's charged with finding that balance must contend with having Blizzard constantly looking over their shoulder.

"If you took a chunk of the games, and made a movie, well, it'd need to be a TV series, really," Jones admits, leading WoW fans everywhere to dream of a Netflix show. "But the more you slice the timeline into really specific points, the more manageable it becomes."

(Mild spoilers follow.)

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary, 'LOCKED OFF'

"So, in the movie, the orcs are coming through the portal, and we're going to close the portal. Instead of changing the lore or characters, our approach was to streamline the time, and address this one very specific moment.

"When you make a movie, you need to do certain things in order to streamline and make it work. Blizzard were good to work with. Sometimes I was able to convince them, sometimes not, but we'd always get together to make it work."

And it does work, for me at least—though a great many critics aren't seeing the movie in quite the same way. I've grown up with Warcraft and, sure, the movie only depicts a very thin slice of an epic timeline, and there are some lore details that just can't be fleshed out over 120 minutes. But Jones does find space and time to develop a number of the characters, ensuring that they're not simply swept along in functional exposition and brain-melting action set-pieces. I don't see any other way it could have been done. It's the characters in Warcraft we remember, after all, not the exact implications of the Draenei schism on three generations of human-orc relations.

The international trailer for 'Warcraft'

My non-gaming girlfriend, who's a fan of the fantasy genre, thought we were watching the live-action version of Warhammer, but she enjoyed the film just as much as I did. And there's a lot to be said for that, showing as it does that you need not be a Warcraft veteran to enjoy the fiction unfolding on screen. But was there ever a tension between appealing to the frothing hardcore and attracting new audiences to the franchise, through the movie?

"There's a lot of humanity in the characters," Jones says. "As long as we're able to create characters who are empathetic and a story with a logical start and end, we should be able to sweep anyone up into a world they've never experienced before."

Speaking of filthy casuals (sorry, darling), there were a fair few amongst Warcraft's cast, who had to be gently coached on the wider significance of their scene-to-scene actions, of their place in this considerable lore. "We had the full spectrum," Jones recalls. "Rob (Kazinsky, playing Orgrim Doomhammer) is a huge, long-time fan, but some of the others knew nothing. I told them, 'Let's make sure this works as a stand-alone film first.' Daniel Wu's (Gul'dan) wife is a big player, so he was getting second-hand info from her. Paula (Patton, who plays Garona the half-orc) didn't know anything, but she was very keen. I had to remind her not to get too deep into it all, so as not to go crazy with all the extra info.

"Travis (Fimmel, who plays the human protagonist Anduin Lothar), though, bless him, wasn't interested. Be yourself, mate! Ben (Foster, the human mage Medivh) wanted to cast magic. And I don't even mean in the movie; he really wanted to learn how to cast magic. He was a method mage!"

Not that making magic on-screen was an easy process. Spells take an agonizingly long time to prepare and charge, everything palpably kinetic. Runes must be drawn from, and when one goes off, it's with some impressively destructive force. "Our motion director came up with a physical language for how to cast spells, and a verbal one—what needs to be said, and what it means," Jones says "They really got into the minutiae of how a magic system would work. Ben puts in so much effort, that it made him feel on set like someone who can teach magic, and is superior to Khadgar (a disciple human mage played by Ben Schnetzer). So that relationship feels real, and I think it really paid off."

Plenty of attention has been placed on Warcraft's special effects. But while its array of leathery orcs do look tremendous, the film is far more than just a pretty (well, fantastically ugly) face. The way I see it, there are some real, relatable themes at play. Especially strong is the idea of family, and fatherhood. The topic's raised for every one of the main characters, and every time the movie draws back from the risk of making proceedings overly melodramatic. "Where I am in life, with a baby coming next month, you get all parent-y," Jones admits. It can't be ignored, either, that Jones lost his own father during the final stages of the film's production.

I might be wrong, as I've not read all of the reviews that have given Warcraft such a poor score on Metacritic, but it might be that these themes have gone over the heads of critics beyond the specialist games press. The Telegraph's Helen O'Hara writes that Jones has struggled to give "emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic." Which seems a strange perspective, considering every single one of those tropes is subverted by both Warcraft's lore and Jones in his making of this film.

The orc leaders are deeply flawed, torn between duty and their own personal struggles, willing to betray one another at the drop of a giant pointy hat if they believe it's in the best interests of their clan. The "mystic" presumably refers to the terrifying and corrupted Gul'dan, who is just as likely to rip your arms off as mutter a little prophecy. And I have no idea what's wrong with a strong "warrior woman" trope when most Hollywood films struggle with giving their female leads proper bras and/or a line of dialogue with another woman that isn't about a man.

Admittedly, Garona does have her overly sexualized moments, and for a half-orc looks remarkably like a human in green paint with some gnarly scars and mini tusks. "Blizzard have a very specific aesthetic in how they portray their characters, and it's not easy bringing that into a live action environment," Jones admits. "With Paula's character, my approach was to get her into her armor as quickly and efficiently as possible. We introduce her as a slave of Gul'dan, she gets captured by humans, we get her into armor, and that becomes her look for the rest of the movie."

Also, perhaps obviously, it's not actually paint. "We saw what Guardians of the Galaxy did with Gamora, painted green. So, instead of painting Paula, we decided to fully rotoscope her and digitally shift her skin two shades greener. Oh, and tusks are hard! You kinda need them though, if you're gonna be an orc."

However successful the film is at the box office, movie making isn't going to stop for Jones after Warcraft. But he's also interested in working in the games industry, revealing that he already did for a brief stint, after finishing film school. "I spent a year and a half working with Demis Hassabis, who created the AI that beat the Go champion. It was fascinating, and something I'm going to be working on . I want to dip my toe in the water—I love games so much, I've gotta do it once in my life."

Jones has quite the pedigree already, and it would be fascinating to see a true native to both film and games broaden his vision to create something we can play, too. His next movie project is potentially Mute, a sci-fi noir flick that's been a dream project of Jones' for 12 years now. It has Alexander Skarsgard, Sam Rockwell, and Paul Rudd attached to it, and is set in the same fictional universe as Moon was. Its concept art looks like a scene from a video game, so could Mute yet spawn an interactive cousin, released in parallel with the motion picture? It'd be a sweet sight: game and movie, created in perfect harmony. And it might just be the way that gaming finally gets over its problem with moving from smaller, domestic screens to those of multiplexes the world over.

Warcraft will be released in the US on June 10.

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An Interview with the Man Recreating 9/11 to 'Put Those Conspiracy Theories to Bed'

There's no topic more fixated upon by conspiracy theorists than 9/11.

At a conservative estimate, I'd say around 70 percent of all videos on YouTube are made by people who believe the facts of 9/11 "don't quite add up"—and each has their own take on why. Some "truthers" think the American government destroyed the Twin Towers with controlled demolitions, blaming al-Qaeda to justify their invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Others suggest there was some kind of insider trading conspiracy at play. A small but very vocal group of anti-Semites insist the attacks were carried out by Israeli Jews, who hoped America would wage war on the Arab world in retaliation.

Lots of theories, lots of people with enough time and imagination to get stuck into them, despite the fact numerous investigations have found no evidence to support any of the ideas put forward. Still, Thailand-based American businessman Paul Salo hopes to move the debate along at least a little by recreating the events of the day in as much detail as possible and crashing a fully-loaded plane into a skyscraper at 500 mph to see what happens.

There is, however, the question of money; he says he needs $1.5 million, which sounds like a pretty optimistic estimate considering he has to build and then destroy a skyscraper. Paul originally turned to Indiegogo to crowd-fund the project, but after critical media coverage the site took down the fund. He's now selling T-shirts to raise the money—a tactic he describes as "our only avenue."

I gave Paul a call to find out his motivations and ask him exactly how he intends to follow through on his plan.

VICE: How's the media attention been?
Paul Salo: It's up and down. I got a bunch of death threats yesterday, so that kind of got me on edge. I've never had that before.

Why did you decide to do this in the first place?
What really kicked it off was I was in New York with a friend last summer, and I said, "Let's go see the Freedom Tower ." He said, "No, it's a complete conspiracy—the official story is all bullshit." So I started asking people, without a judgmental attitude, just trying to get the truth about what they believed. The response was that it looked like the buildings fell too far—you know, how could it fall that fast? If there were only two planes then why did three buildings fall? These are the kind of questions that make people say, "Wait a second." When something big happens like this, I feel like it has to be recreated. I think with things that are hard to believe, you need proof.

Do you believe it was a government conspiracy?
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, not a truther. In fact, a lot of the truthers don't like me—they don't really want to know story, where ten is completely believing it, I'd say they're an eight—they maybe doubt a few things.

What kind of people are you looking for to help you?
I want to find the most unbiased people we can, and people who can determine the exact things that we'll need—everything from the legality of the project, to the specifics: the speed, the height .

How have you been raising money since Indiegogo closed your page down?
At first, people were hesitant to start giving money, but all of a sudden they started sending money and sending me emails saying that they liked the project. We have one guy in Australia who wants to give $350,000, another person interested in giving $50,000. But we need to work out the logistics of how we do it; I don't want to get into any kind of trouble with money laundering. We don't want to sell T-shirts , but we see it as the best option at the moment.

What happens if you manage to raise the funds and prove it was a government conspiracy? That's got massive implications.
We can't prove it, but what we can do is show what happens when a similar airplane hits a similar building, and that's going to educate people about what happens in that situation. If nothing happens that happened on 9/11 there's no explosion, just a fire inside the building—that's going to set off a chain of events. If you look at history, every time a government does something sketchy and people find out, there's often a lot of payback for those involved, and it's often not so nice. I don't know what's going happen, but whatever we raise, we're going to use that money as best we can.

So how exactly are you going to do it?
It depends on how much money we get. There's a company in China that basically makes prefab skyscrapers—they just made a building in five weeks; they basically had to bolt it together and put the outside on—and if we could afford it, they would want to partner with us.

And what about the plane? How do you plan to fly it into the building? Is that even legal?
The legality will be determined by the ultimate , i.e. are they a signatory to The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)? We're still exploring options, but we're confident that somehow this can be managed.

Where are you going to get the plane from?
This is the easiest part of the project—there are many for sale on eBay. We'd prefer one with a working black box, as on September 11 all four black boxes didn't survive the crashes. Again, this won't definitely prove anything either way, and true believers will likely not be swayed. However, I believe we will gain significant insight to make this project worthwhile.

How do you plan to fly the planes into a building without the pilots dying?
There will be no pilots onboard upon impact.

Okay. So if this goes ahead, are you going to start trying to disprove other conspiracies?
Sure. The other big conspiracy is that we didn't go to the moon, right? So if SpaceX can go to the moon, I'd like to go to the moon. If we can land at the same location they did in 1969 and look for the wreckage, that would be awesome. If we could prove they were real, that's good for everybody. I think it hurts the US a lot that people don't trust or believe these things. And, at the same time, if they're not true, people deserve to know.

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​We Asked an Expert if Shark Attacks Are Really Getting Worse Because of Climate Change

Are more of these guys going to be feeding on humans now that the world is getting hotter? Photo via YouTube

Every summer, our collective obsession with sharks fucking humans up rears its ugly head. Ever since Jaws dah-domped its way into our collective unconscious, society has gone into a mass freakout over "man-eating" sharks, which manifests in sensational reports of reports about vicious attacks, huge bite marks, and washed-up bodies in our televisions and news feeds. Recently, researchers suggested that climate change—with its ability to push people to cool off at the beach—is actually causing an increase in shark attacks in the United States, although the data can't say that definitively.

To get a better idea if this shark shit is still just media hype, we asked James Sulikowski, professor at University of New England and expert on sharks, if the ocean's top predator is really something we need to worry about.

VICE: I'll start off by asking the obvious: are sharks a real threat to humans?James Sulikowski: Sharks pose no immediate threat to human beings whatsoever. I could go on and on and on—there's tons of different statistics to point to that, but it's so relative. We see sharks as a threat because they're overreported on, not , there are some that are over-fished, but the fact of the matter is that they do play a very important role in the ecosystem. When you take away that top predator, things get out of balance. You get a lot of cute and cuddly seals, which are ferocious predators and can really screw up the ecosystem.

Sharks kind of sound like the spiders of the ocean—we hate them out of a phobia, but they're actually pretty useful.
Absolutely. Really, sharks are lazy—they eat dead and dying animals so that the ecosystem can get stronger. I don't think people really realize that, they just see them as these people-killers.

What's the best way to interact with a shark that swims up beside you?Realistically, just be aware of your surroundings. Stay out of the water at dawn and dusk, don't wear a lot of shiny things, don't hang around people who are fishing. If you cut those kind of things out, you're really going to limit your interactions with sharks. If one shows up, just calmly begin to head toward shore and get out of the water. Almost every time, nothing's going to happen. If you get bit by a shark, my advice to you is go buy a lottery ticket, because your chances are pretty much equal.

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The Exciting and Terrifying Future of DNA Editing

In 2014, my husband and I engaged in the most intimate of acts: we blended our genes and created an embryo. This tiny human, now nine months old, is genetically half him and half me. We were hoping our daughter would get my looks and my husband's temperament; instead she seems to have inherited his pale skin and my pig-headedness. We supplied her genetic building blocks, but fate arranged them into a new being.

If we had waited a decade or two to procreate, we might've gained the upper hand on fate by picking and choosing genes to shape her physical features, her temperament, even her identity. This is the peril and promise of genetics. It's what makes the gene "one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science," writes Pulitzer prize-winning author and cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee. [Full disclosure: Mukherjee is working with VICE on a new initiative, to be announced in the coming months.]

In his new book, The Gene: An intimate history, Mukherjee gives us a sweeping history of genetics­­­—from the cockamamie ideas that preceded the birth of the field (eg.: sperm sculpt embryos out of menstrual blood) to our current attempts to decipher and manipulate the human genome, and finally a sometimes-terrifying picture of what the future holds.

Mukherjee begins with a peek at the skeletons in his own genetic closet: two uncles and a cousin crippled by mental illness. Their unraveling left an indelible mark on Mukherjee. "Scarcely a day passes in my adult life when I do not think about inheritance and family," he writes. When he met the woman who would become his wife, he warned her about the "splintered minds" in his family.

Mukherjee sprinkles brief personal interludes throughout the 500-page book, but he devotes the bulk of The Gene to a chronological history of the field. Some characters will be familiar from high school biology—Mendel, Darwin, Watson, Crick—but Mukherjee gives them new vigor and vastly expands the cast. The book often entertains, but this isn't a beach read. The middle sections, packed with the findings and technologies that propelled genetics into the modern era, can feel a bit like schoolwork. But those who don't mind slowing down to digest the concepts Mukherjee lays out will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of how the human recipe encoded in our cells gives rise to a human being.

The Gene also offers a window into the inner workings of science itself. Mukherjee gives us the breakthroughs, of course, but he also delves into the rivalries, the missteps, and the sometimes excruciating monotony of the experiments: In the early 1970s, a team of researchers including a young biologist named Robert Horvitz began trying to map the location of every cell in a worm's body in an attempt to understand the fate of each. "It was exhausting, hallucination-inducing work, 'like watching a bowl of hundreds of grapes' for hours at a time, Horvitz recalled, and then mapping each grape as it changed its position in time and space."

The book's finest bits deal with the impact of genetics on society: the Nazi eugenics program in Germany, for example, and the sterilization program in the US, which began carrying out tubal ligations of "feebleminded" women in the 1920s. One case, Buck v. Bell, made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In the majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that it would be better to sterilize those who are "manifestly unfit" than "to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility." These programs attempted to shape society's collective DNA by eliminating undesirables or their children.

No reasonable person would defend that kind of strategy today, but that doesn't mean we've stopped trying to shape the human genome. Far from it. Mukherjee points out that we already routinely test fetuses for Down syndrome and other serious genetic defects. Couples can choose to end a pregnancy on the basis of these tests. In the future, we'll undoubtedly have the ability to test for many more diseases. But most illnesses—cancer, for example—depend on a slew of genes and some sort of external trigger. These genes might predispose an individual to an outcome, but they aren't a guarantee. Should we eliminate a fetus or embryo because it's likely to develop cancer or schizophrenia? Or, to go one step further, should we edit genes linked to disease? These kinds of scenarios can inspire "both wonder and a certain moral queasiness," Mukherjee writes. "Illness might progressively vanish, but so might identity."

We often describe genetic mutations as defects, but Mukherjee points out that a mutation is just a deviation from the norm. The defect or disease arises when a mutation creates a mismatch between an organism and its environment. "In the land of the blind, the sighted man is king. But flood that land with a toxic, blinding light—and the kingdom reverts to the blind," Mukherjee writes. So how do we decide as a society which mutations to eliminate and which to promote? And what will be the cost? These are the questions we'll have to address sooner rather than later. "The most remarkable fact about human genomic engineering today is not how far out of reach it is, but how perilously, tantalizingly near," Mukherjee writes.

I often find myself wondering what the future holds for my daughter. Will she be happy? Will she get sick? Will she have a long life? I might find some of the answers in her genes. But even if I could read the code, or rewrite it, I probably wouldn't. DNA might seem like destiny, but most genes don't dictate our path or our destination. They're more like a powerful wind, nudging us this way or that.

Follow Cassandra Willyard on Twitter.

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Daily VICE: Motherboard Is Launching a Ton of New Web Shows About the Future of Technology

On this episode of Daily VICE, Derek Mead, Motherboard's editor-in-chief, gives us an exclusive look at a few of the tech channel's experimental new web series, including shows that look at epic hacking moments in history and ask kids what they think about the internet. Motherboard plans on producing more of the shows that get the best feedback from viewers, so head to the site to check out each of the pilots launching this week.

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