“No Right Is Absolute”: Assault Weapons Are Weapons Of Mass Destruction And Should Be Banned
The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a “gun”?
I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns — hunting rifles and shotguns — for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.
But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders — except the fact that they are referred to “guns.”
Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat — and that mission alone.
No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?
Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.
Let’s be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.
When an individual is willing — or perhaps eager — to die making a big “statement” by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn’t matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.
And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns — or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives — he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.
Of course you hear people say — oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction — many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn’t easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.
More important, assault weapons have no redeeming social value or alternative use whatsoever. The only reason to purchase an assault weapon, instead of a long gun used for target practice or hunting, is to kill and maim large numbers of human beings.
And it is not the case that if assault weapons were banned ordinary people would get them anyway. We certainly don’t take that attitude with nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. We make it very hard for a terrorist to get nuclear weapons or dirty bomb. It used to be hard to get assault weapons.
When the former President of Mexico visited the United States some time ago to discuss the drug-fueled violence on the Mexican border, he pointed out that the end of the assault weapons ban in the U.S. had resulted in an explosion of smuggling of assault weapons from the United States to Mexico. Weapons that were previously unavailable in large numbers, became plentiful. He begged the United States to re-impose the assault weapons ban.
Allowing easy access to assault weapons guarantees that terrorists, criminals and mentally unstable people will use them to commit future acts of mass murder — it’s that simple. There are seven billion people on the planet. Try as we may, we are not going to prevent some of those seven billion people from becoming terrorists, criminals or mentally unstable. Why make it easy for them to do harm to their fellow human beings by giving them easy access to a weapon of mass destruction?
Since this tragedy, there have been calls for greater restrictions and background checks on those who can buy guns — and there should be. But from all accounts, the weapons used in the Connecticut murders were purchased legally by the shooter’s mother — who herself appeared to be perfectly sane right up to the moment that Lanza used those same weapons to end her life.
The NRA will no doubt repeat its mantra about the “slippery slope.” “If we ban assault weapons, shotguns will be next,” they say. Really? By banning anyone from buying Stinger Missiles that are used to shoot down airplanes do we make it more likely that the government will one day prevent people from hunting ducks?
The simple fact is that no right is absolute because rights come into conflict with each other. Your free speech does not give you the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater.
Is the NRA’s concern that banning assault weapons will put us on a “slippery slope” more important than the lives of those 20 first graders? Should it really take precedence over the fact that today in Newtown, Connecticut there are 20 families with holiday presents on a closet shelf, that were purchased for an excited six-year-old who will never open them?
Are the NRA’s fears more important than the terror faced by children in the Sandy Hook Elementary school last week?
Does the right to own an assault weapon take precedence over the right of those parents to see their children grow up, and graduate from college, and stand at the alter to be married, and have children of their own?
The bottom line is that there is no reason why weapons of mass destruction of any sort – chemical weapons, biological weapons, RPG’s, improvised explosive devices (IED’s), missiles, dirty bombs, nuclear devices, or assault weapons — should be easily accessible. For 10 years there was a ban on the production, ownership and use of assault weapons in the United States until Congress and the Bush Administration allowed it to lapse when it sunset and came up for reauthorization in 2004.
A serious response to the tragedy in Connecticut requires that Congress act to reinstate the assault weapons ban before the children of other families fall victim to the fantasies of some other mentally unbalanced individual — or the ideology of a terrorist who has been empowered by our failure to act.
By: Robert Creamer, February 18, 2013; Originally Posted in The Huffington Post Blog, December 16, 2012
“When Republicans Were Problem-Solvers”: The Idea Of Politics As All-Ideology, All-The-Time Is A Relatively Recent GOP Invention
We interrupt this highly partisan and ideological moment with some contrarian news: President Obama is not the only politician who thinks that expanding access to pre-kindergarten is a good investment.
In Alabama, Republican Gov. Robert Bentley urged a 60 percent increase in preschool funding in his state, with the goal of having a universal preschool system in place within 10 years. “I truly believe by allowing greater access to a voluntary pre-K education,” Bentley declared this month in his State of the State message, “we will change the lives of children in Alabama.” The state Bentley leads is not a notoriously liberal place.
In Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder just proposed a large increase in preschool funding — from $109 million this fiscal year to $174 million in 2014 and $239 million in 2015.
Nobody should pretend that the president has found in pre-K education the key that will unlock bipartisanship. Right out of the box, Andrew J. Coulson of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom told the New York Times that Obama’s plan “just doesn’t make any sense” while Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, sounded a skeptical note in saying the president “needs to explain how this program will be different.”
But by today’s partisan standards, Kline’s comment was remarkably restrained. So it’s worth pausing to wonder if we might be slowly opening an era when Republicans will be feeling a little less pressure to mouth tea-party attacks on government and more incentive to say that they, too, want to solve problems that concern the vast majority of Americans.
In pushing universal pre-K, Obama made a shrewd choice in both political and policy terms. There are enough studies to show that early childhood education programs make a real difference, which is why Republicans such as Snyder and Bentley embrace them. And Obama is structuring his initiative to work with the states to build on what many of them are already doing or would like to do.
This beachhead of cooperation might also serve as a reminder to Republicans that the idea of politics as all-ideology, all-the-time is a relatively recent invention. Education reform was a thoroughly bipartisan cause in the 1980s. Governors such as Democrats Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Richard Riley in South Carolina and Republican Lamar Alexander in Tennessee teamed up to push for higher standards. Alexander, who is now in the Senate, was willing to raise taxes to finance his education initiatives.
There is also the tale of Tommy Thompson, who as governor of Wisconsin in the 1990s tried to broaden health insurance coverage with his “BadgerCare” program. Early in the debate over Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Thompson called it “another important step” toward achieving reform.
Thompson had to eat those words when he sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate last year in the face of tea party opposition. The rebuke of Thompson from Chris Chocola, president of the conservative Club for Growth, was representative. “The world has changed since he was elected to office,” said Chocola, who had endorsed one of Thompson’s primary opponents. “Now we’re talking about how much less we’ll spend rather than how much more we’ll spend.” That was right-wing ideology speaking.
Thompson survived the primary but was then defeated by Democrat Tammy Baldwin. While liberals cheered Baldwin’s victory, there was something poignant in Thompson’s losing, in part because he traded in his problem-solving past for a new anti-government disposition that didn’t really fit him.
Despite the abuse of the rules on Chuck Hagel’s confirmation, you sense that Republicans such as Thompson and Alexander (there are many others) are exasperated with the view that the only point of seeking public office is to shrink government. But it will take considerable courage for such Republicans to move their party back to a time when conservatives and progressives did not have to disagree on everything — when causes such as helping 4-year-olds to learn and thrive could encourage politicians to lay down their arms at least momentarily.
There are other issues that ought to be like this: training and education programs to restore mobility and ease inequalities; immigration reform; and at least parts of Obama’s agenda to curb gun violence. But progress will require conservatives to give up certain recent habits and remember when they, too, believed that government could successfully remedy some of the nation’s ills.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 17, 2013
“Seniors Take Note”: Republicans Effectively Confessed To Having Mislead Conservative Members Who Now Must Be Mollified
I’m not sure House Republicans realized how large an error they made by kidnapping and then releasing the debt limit earlier this year. By admitting their bluff, they effectively confessed to having misled conservative members, and those members needed to be mollified.
That created a new problem: How could they appease conservatives while lacking the power to satisfy any of their substantive demands? So they offered up grandiose symbolism: A raincheck on the brinksmanship (the current fight over the sequester) and a promise to pass a budget that would wipe out the deficit in 10 years if enacted.
But it’s not clear that they counted their votes, or considered the budget math when they made that promise.
“We are saying a 10-year balance — that’s tougher than the last [Paul] Ryan budget,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), a former Budget Committee member told Politico.
“There could be a significant number of Republicans that say, ‘I’m not going there because it would be too dramatic.’ I have said to my constituents, nobody is talking about changing Social Security and Medicare if you’re 55 years or over.’ I’ve been selling it for three or four years that way. So have many other members. Well, to balance in 10, that 55 years is going to move up to 58, 59, 60. It makes us look like we’re going back on what we were telling people when we were trying to sell this.
We haven’t seen Ryan’s latest budget, so we don’t know what precise ratio of funny math and concessions to reality he’ll use to make the numbers work. And until he’s written it he won’t offer many hints.
But we do know a couple things. First, given Republicans’ famous preference for never increasing taxes or cutting defense spending, we know that it’s probably impossible for them to draft a budget that balances in 10 years without eating into entitlement benefits for people older than 55. Second, per above, we know that GOP leaders promised conservatives a budget that balances over 10 years to win their support for increasing the debt limit. So either Ryan will produce a budget that relies on sleight of hand more than his previous budgets did, or he’ll have to admit that the GOP’s pledge to leave retirement programs untouched for people over 55 was neither sincere nor sustainable.
As Simpson’s quote suggests, that’ll make it harder for Republicans to pass a budget at all; and if they do, it’ll come at a potentially enormous cost with their voting base.
By: Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, TPM Editor’s Blog, February 15, 2013
“Ill Omen”: The Country Has A Confidence Problem And It’s Congress’s Fault
The country has a confidence problem, and Congress bears much of the responsibility for it.
That conclusion, drawn by Republican pollster Bill McInturff, carries ill omens as lawmakers seem all but certain to let more than $1 trillion in automatic spending cuts go into effect at the end of the month and with fights over keeping the government funded and raising the debt ceiling looming.
“It is clear we have entered a new phase where the dysfunction and paralysis in Washington is having a significant and deleterious impact on how consumers feel about the overall state of the economy and their personal financial situations,” writes McInturff in an analysis entitled “The Washington Economy.”
As evidence of his assertion, McInturff cites the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index in the months leading up to the “fiscal cliff” fight last winter. From October to December, consumer confidence dipped from 82.6 to 72.9. (The Michigan Index is based on a 100-point scale.) McInturff notes that the index typically moves only a point or two a month, and that such large-scale moves within such a short time typically require a “signal event” like Hurricane Katrina (a 19.6-point drop in two months), Iraq invading Kuwait (15.4-point drop) or the Lehman Brothers collapse (15-point drop).
The “fiscal cliff” debate (a 9.7 point drop) and the 2011 debt ceiling showdown (15.8) fit neatly into that category of signal events, a remarkable reflection of how what happens — or, more accurately, doesn’t happen — in Washington reverberates around the country. (One remarkable factoid: The drop in consumer confidence during the “fiscal cliff” debate was larger than the one that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.)
The Michigan Index is not alone in showing the drastic impact on confidence that the seemingly endless fiscal fights in Washington are causing. In the summer of 2011 — at the heart of the debt ceiling debate — Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index showed a score of -54. (The lowest possible number is -100, the highest is 100.) At the end of 2012, confidence dipped again in the Gallup measurement — down to -22.
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. Of late, the Michigan Index has been showing increased public confidence, hitting a three-month high of 76.3 this month. And, the Gallup number reached as high as -8 earlier this month —a five-year high— before dipping back down to -13 last week.
But, a look at the longer trend suggests that the country is in the grips of a broader crisis of confidence that Washington is making worse. Looking all the way back to 2008 when Gallup began testing economic confidence, the organization has never — repeat, never — turned out a positive confidence score in its daily tracking polling. And, as McInturff notes, the country is now in the midst of a historically long run of low confidence. It has been 59 months since the Michigan Index dropped below 65 and it has never been back above 85. That’s the longest recovery period of any time since World War II; in 1974, amid the Watergate scandal, the Michigan Index dropped below 65, but 30 months later it was over 85 again.
Then consider that the sequester seems all but certain to kick in on March 1, the potential for a government shutdown on March 31, and the debt ceiling debate returning later this summer and it seems clear that the current bump in confidence is likely to be short-lived. Put another way: We may well be in the eye of an economic confidence hurricane.
What’s clear from all the data is that a federal government that lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis as its normal course of business is doing a great disservice to a country badly looking to finds its footing again.
“It is important leaders in both parties begin to recognize how the tenor, tone and the outcome of the policy debates in Washington are actually retarding economic confidence in a way that makes building a sustained recovery more difficult,” concludes McInturff.
The warnings, from the debt ceiling fight through the “fiscal cliff” crisis, are clear. But, political Washington has shown a remarkable inability to heed them in the past few years. If that doesn’t change in the next three months, the impact on the nation’s economy could be drastic.
By: Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post, The Fix, February 17, 2013
“Weather Vane Man”: Tracking Paul Ryan’s 5 Different Positions On The Sequester
House Republicans are attempting to blame Democrats and President Obama for “sequestration,” the automatic budget cuts that will begin taking effect on March 1 if Congress fails to avert them. But even as they cast that blame and ignore their own role in creation of the sequester, which wouldn’t exist had Republicans not refused to raise the debt ceiling in August 2011, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is expected to count the sequester’s automatic cuts in the next version of his budget, BuzzFeed reports:
According to two senior GOP aides familiar with Ryan’s thinking on the budget, the Wisconsin Republican and former vice presidential candidate will use the so-called sequester as part of the baseline level of spending for his budget.
Ryan’s position on the sequester has changed multiple times:
1. Helped make the sequester happen. Ryan was among the Republicans leading demands for spending cuts to offset a debt ceiling increase in the summer of 2011, and was among the leaders who refused to consider new revenues in those negotiations. Had Republicans not refused to raise the debt ceiling in the first place, the sequester wouldn’t exist.
2. Voted for plan to create the sequester, then bragged about it. Ryan took credit for the sequester in August 2011, bragging to Fox News that it guaranteed the massive budget cuts Republicans were seeking. “We got that in law,” he boasted. On the House floor, he said the Budget Control Act’s spending cuts were “a victory for those committed to controlling government spending.”
3. Called the sequester “devastating” during the presidential election. Ryan blasted Obama for wanting the sequester’s “devastating defense cuts” to take place during the presidential election, when he was the GOP’s vice presidential candidate.
4. Blamed the likelihood of the sequester occurring on Obama. The sequester “will probably occur” because “the president has not a proposal yet on the table,” Ryan told CBS News last week. “Don’t forget it’s the president who first proposed the sequester. It’s the president who designed the sequester as it is now designed,” he added.
5. Will include sequester cuts in his latest budget.
This is hardly a new strategy for Ryan, who crisscrossed the country blasting Obama for cutting Medicare spending even as he included the cuts in his last budget proposal and made even bigger changes to the program.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, February 15, 2013
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