“The Mark Of A Weak Organization”: The NRA And America’s Long History Of Absolutist Extremism
Watching Wayne LaPierre’s press conference today (transcript here) I found myself searching for various synonyms of “insane” to describe it. Unglued, unhinged, taken leave of his senses, etc. It reads like the nutty handwritten letters to the editor magazines get, complete with lots of italicizations and exclamation points.
But the truth is this is not true madness. It’s something as old as the country, which bears some eerie similarity to the extremism of the slavery movement, as a lovely piece Ta-Nehisi Coates put up today argued. Here’s a taste:
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren’t satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln–who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South–as members of a “Black Republican” conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery.
Rather than accede to Douglas’s nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln’s path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed.
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a “massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.” It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA’s mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over “Fast and Furious.” Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat.
This could be a positive development in the medium term, I suspect. The NRA still has a lot of clout, and they’re not clinically insane, but they’ve clearly lost the ability to know what they sound like to non-gun nuts, or a view of sensible tactics. That kind of overreach is the mark of a weak organization—one particularly vulnerable to being baited by the other side into overreach. I predict much trolling of the NRA in the coming weeks.
By: Ryan Cooper, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“The NRA Shoots Itself In The Foot”: A Shill For Gun Manufacturers And The Home Of Unhinged Conspiracy Theorists
The National Rifle Association finally weighed in on the gun debate today, in a news conference (albeit one in which they took no questions) setting out their feelings at this critical moment. And they gave the movement for greater restrictions on guns the biggest favor it could have hoped for. While the organization was once devoted to marksmanship and gun safety, in recent years it has increasingly become a shill for the gun manufacturers that fund it and the home of unhinged conspiracy theorists. As it showed today, the worst thing it can do for its cause is to step into the light.
You can read Wayne LaPierre’s entire statement here, but here’s a choice excerpt:
We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.
Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?
The italics and exclamation points are in the original. LaPierre went on to say, “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.” Gun manufacturers? Nope. Hollywood! He went on to blame the news media, and even added a little doomsday prepper rhetoric (“Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization”). And then came the proposal: What we need to do, LaPierre said, is immediately place armed police officers in every school in America.
So the NRA’s plan is this: Make sure that as many people as possible buy as many guns as possible and are allowed to take them into as many places as possible. And then, as this army of “monsters and predators” descends upon our schools, have someone there to return fire. Sounds reasonable.
If the NRA had just kept its head low like it did after every other mass shooting we’ve had in recent years, it would have done itself a favor. But I think that in years to come we may look back on this press conference as one of the key moments in a change in how people and legislators think of the NRA. It was a big public reminder, to people who may not have been aware of it, that these people are crazy. Even many gun owners, and many of the NRA’s own members, think the positions the organization takes are too extreme. When it’s this public about its dream vision of the society it would like to see, where every public place, from streets to supermarkets to parks to restaurants to schools, is nothing more than a gun battle waiting to happen, people are going to recoil in disgust. And to repeat, that includes lots of people who own guns.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“A Crazed Romance With Guns”: The Answer To Gun Carnage Is Not Arming Teachers
Have you ever seen the holiday film classic “A Christmas Story”? Set in 1940s Indiana, it’s the charming tale of young Ralphie, whose only wish for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun. Poor Ralphie is constantly rebuffed by the adults in his life, who warn him, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
During this shattered holiday season, with so many Connecticut families experiencing unimaginable loss, the movie is a reminder that guns have always been popular in the American imagination. It also gently reminded me, however, that previous generations were much more circumspect and cautious in their attitudes toward firearms.
I am delighted that President Obama, shocked to his senses by the carnage in Connecticut, has finally found the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and take steps toward more regulation of firearms. But I fear that won’t be enough.
Don’t get me wrong: I support a ban on assault-type weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and waiting periods for gun purchases. All of those are common-sense measures that should already be the law of the land.
But I don’t think those steps will be enough to change a culture steeped in gun lore and conditioned to believe that firearms hold some magical powers to keep the streets safe. Somehow, our crazed romance with guns — a dangerous and dysfunctional relationship — must end.
It hasn’t always been this way. My late father came of age in the 1930s and ’40s in deepest, reddest Alabama. He was an avid outdoorsman who loved fishing and hunting. Nothing made my father happier than awakening in the wee hours on a crisp morning in November to go out into the cold and stalk deer. Go figure.
I think he would have been amused — or perhaps puzzled — by the ad campaign that Bushmaster adopted to sell its AR-15 assault-type rifle, which was used by the Connecticut shooter. The campaign bestowed “manhood” on Bushmaster buyers. I don’t think my dad — who worked hard, supported his family and tried to teach his children right from wrong — ever thought his manhood was in question.
A veteran of combat in Korea, he was as strict about gun safety as the National Rifle Association is imprudent. He and his hunting buddies refused to hunt with rifles because the projectiles are too powerful and travel too far; they used shotguns instead. They banned hunters whom they deemed careless. Dick Cheney would not have been welcome.
As a young college graduate headed for the big city, I contemplated buying a firearm. My father wouldn’t hear of it, noting that I’d be more likely to be a victim of my own handgun than to ward off danger with it. He suggested that I stay out of dangerous places instead.
My dad was also a junior-high-school principal, and I think he would be horrified — simply horrified — by the irrational suggestion from some political leaders that the answer to school shootings is to arm teachers. He knew perfectly well that arming teachers would be a way to get more children killed.
As the term “friendly fire” connotes, soldiers and police officers, who undergo intense weapons training, frequently miss their targets or hit others by mistake. Last August, as just one example, New York City police officers killed a gunman outside the Empire State Building. Nine bystanders also ended up wounded, all by police gunfire or ricochets.
When did so many of our political leaders — governors, members of Congress, state legislators — lose their senses about guns? How did we come to have a culture in which public figures believe it is rational to advocate arming teachers to prevent school massacres?
Even as some of the loudest gun advocates have become more hysterical in their absolutism, the number of households with guns has actually decreased over the last few decades, according to polls and federal data. Unfortunately, the number of guns owned by a smaller portion of households has increased.
Meanwhile, reasonable, old-school outdoorsmen like my dad aren’t speaking up. They need to stand up and be counted.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 22, 2012
“The NRA’s Worse Nightmare”: Gun-Rights Advocates Should Fear History Of Second Amendment
On Sunday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer went on CBS’s Face The Nation and argued that people who support gun control “have to admit that there is a Second Amendment right to bear arms”.
Schumer’s effort to reach out to the gun-rights community may be well-intentioned, but it is also deeply ironic. If the nation truly embraced the Second Amendment as it was originally written and understood, it would be the NRA’s worst nightmare.
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.
It’s time for a history lesson about one of America’s most popular and least understood rights. It’s also long past time to expose the hollow, ignorant fawning over the Second Amendment by gun-rights advocates for what it is.
In contrast to the libertarian fantasies that drive the contemporary debate about firearms in America, the Founders understood that liberty without regulation leads not to freedom, but anarchy. They understood that an armed body of citizens easily becomes a mob. In other words, a bunch of guys grabbing their guns and waving a flag emblazoned with a rattlesnake is not a militia.
A cursory look at the history of the Second Amendment shows that regulation was a central part of its rationale—putting “well regulated” at the very start of the amendment was no accident. For instance, starting in the colonial period, states enacted a variety of “safe-storage” measures to deal with the danger posed by stored gunpowder. A 1786 law went as far as prohibiting the storage of a loaded gun in any building in Boston.
But many people who defend gun rights today are more than happy to skim over the first part of the amendment in their zeal to embrace the second. (The NRA itself literally chopped off that pesky first half when it chiseled the words on the face of its old headquarters.) As a result, our modern gun-rights ideology is often unmoored from any sense of corresponding civic obligation.
This ideology claims to rely heavily on the Second Amendment, and yet it is rooted not in the Founders’ vision, but in the insurrectionary ideas of Daniel Shays and those who rose up against the government of Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787. Indeed, there are gun-rights advocates today who think the Second Amendment actually gives them the right to take up arms against the government—but if that were true the Second Amendment would have repealed the Constitution’s treason clause, which defines treason as taking up arms against the government!
This is all so deeply twisted: after all, the Founders framed the Constitution in part as a response to the danger posed by Shays’ Rebellion.
As a result, our modern debate over gun rights has virtually nothing to with the Founders’ Second Amendment; that debate actually started about 30 years after the Amendment was adopted. What emerged was the notion that reasonable regulation was not inconsistent with the right to bear arms. In fact it was the only option in a heavily armed society.
Up until the 1980s, there was no “individual-rights” theory of the Second Amendment. Many states had adopted provisions protecting an individual right to own guns, but this tradition was distinct from the Amendment. All that changed when right-wing think tanks undertook a conscious effort to fund new scholarship to rewrite the amendment’s history. At first that effort was not well received, even in conservative circles. As late as 1991, former Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger famously called the idea of an individual right to bear arms “one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
But the revisionism ultimately won over most of the legal establishment, reaching its zenith in 2008, when the Supreme Court broke with 70 years of established jurisprudence and affirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have guns in the home for reasons of self-defense.
In order to do this, the majority followed the lead of gun-rights advocates and essentially excised the first clause of the amendment—the “well-regulated militia” part—from the text.
(Let us pause briefly to note the irony that the opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller, was written by none other than Justice Antonin Scalia—America’s staunchest defender of originalism, or reading the Constitution according to its supposed original meaning.)
If the Heller court had simply said, “Look, most Americans think the Amendment is about an individual right, and no one really cares what James Madison or the average man on the street in 1791 thought”—then the case would be pretty uncontroversial. Instead, Scalia produced a pompous, error-filled opinion that has done more to discredit his beloved originalism than a generation of liberal academics ever could.
Even leading conservative legal scholars have harshly criticized the ruling: federal judge Richard Posner said most professional historians reject Scalia’s historical analysis in the case, and described Scalia’s jurisprudence as “incoherent”. Perhaps even more damning, J. Harvie Wilkinson, a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, compared Heller to Roe v. Wade.
Of course, the fact that the Second Amendment is now treated as an individual right has almost no bearing on gun regulation, because no right is absolute. You can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, nor can you fire a gun in one.
And most Americans—including those who own guns—are open to reasonable gun regulation. The only people who oppose such policies are the NRA, extreme gun-rights advocates, and the craven politicians who do their bidding.
But what would such regulation look like?
For one thing, we could have a comprehensive system of firearm licensing and registration. At the moment we have none (even though it is hard to fathom how one might ever muster a militia without such a system). To avoid the irrational fears of gun confiscation, such a system ought to be instituted by the states, which maintained militias long before the Second Amendment existed. Could anyone with even a minimal understanding of the history of the Second Amendment seriously maintain that a state-based system violated the Amendment’s text or spirit?
The bottom line is that although we hear the Second Amendment invoked all the time, few of those who trumpet it the most vehemently realize that restoring the Founders’ vision of the Second Amendment would be a call for more gun regulation, not less.
By: Saul Cornell, The Daily Beast, December 18, 2012
“Unfit For Responsibility”: What Americans Should Learn From The “Republican Apocalypse”
What may finally consume the House Republicans is their boundless contempt for the American public – a contempt bluntly demonstrated in their refusal to consider any reasonable compromise with President Obama to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” on December 31. They know from the election results (and every poll) that the public believes taxes should be raised on the wealthy. They know that the public wants bipartisan compromise. And they know that the approval rating of the House Republicans, in contrast to the president’s upwardly trending numbers, are veering toward historic lows.
Moreover, they claim to believe that the major tax hikes and spending cuts that will occur on January 1, if negotiations, fail, will be ruinous for the American and perhaps the world economy. (And never mind that this concern validates Keynesian economics, flatly contradicting their professed ideology.) Failure to achieve a deal may result in a renewed recession or worse.
Yet the majority of Republican members adhere so blindly to their far-right ideology that on Thursday evening, they humiliated their own leadership by refusing to support Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” — and effectively scuttled negotiations between the House leadership and the White House. Boehner thought a bill to increase taxes only on households earning more than $1 million annually would pass the House, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor confidently announced. “We’re going to have the votes,” he said on Thursday afternoon. Several hours later the House leaders cancelled the roll call on the tax bill, admitting that they didn’t have the votes.
This embarrassing episode – the “Mayan Apocalypse” of the Republicans Party – demonstrates again why they are unfit for the responsibilities of national office.
They proved their unfitness the first time in the summer of 2011, when they held the national debt ceiling hostage, supposedly to reduce spending, and succeeded only in damaging both the nation’s credit rating and the economic recovery. Now they have declared their unwillingness to negotiate with a newly re-elected president, who won easily on the taxation issue. Although they held the majority, they actually lost seats and received fewer total votes than the House Democrats. But still they see no reason to deal with the president or acknowledge the national consensus.
Naturally, public anger at the Republicans is growing. But how furious would people feel if they fully understood this latest absurd episode on Capitol Hill? Boehner’s proposal was exceptionally generous to the wealthiest taxpayers – and mean to the poor and working families.
His Plan B would have extended the Bush tax cuts for their first million dollars of income; repealed a limit on tax deductions by the highest-income households; established a dividend tax rate of only 20 percent; and maintained an estate tax break for those same highest-income families worth an average $1.1 million. At the same time, according to the authoritative Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Boehner’s bill would have ended various tax credits for low-income and middle-income families, costing them roughly $25 billion a year and driving millions of American children into poverty.
But awful as that proposal was, it was deemed too liberal by the dominant faction in the Republican caucus. They found it so offensively decent, so treasonously moderate, that they made fools of their own leaders and themselves rather than let negotiations continue. (Their spending bill was even worse.)
The president is fortunate in his opposition, whose obstinacy and extremism may yet prevent him from making a terrible deal to damage Social Security or Medicare when neither is necessary. He wanted to make deal – very badly – but there is nobody with the competence or sanity with whom to make a deal, not even a raw deal.
Now Obama must explain clearly what has happened. Perhaps then voters will begin to draw the obvious conclusion – that this country’s problems cannot be addressed, let alone solved, until they remove these Republicans from power.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 21, 2012
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