“Our Country Is Rapidly Becoming Militarized”: America Is Nervous; We Must Lay Down Our Arms
There are far too many loose guns floating around the United States of America. What are we doing? This is not the world our forefathers conceived when they wrote the Second Amendment. Violence begets violence, and with no reasonable measures for arms control — our country is rapidly becoming militarized. The police are reacting to threats. Every angry or troubled soul could be carrying a concealed weapon and usually is. Yeah, yeah, yeah we have the right to bear arms ala the Second Amendment, but that was signed into law way before assault rifles were even a glimmer on the horizon. We are at an impasse in our country, society and culture, and must find a way to resolution.
Indeed guns are part of large sectors of our country often passed down through the generations – father to son. But it seems that our reality has changed. Too many novices are running wild and getting access to high powered weaponry. Last week, another young, white, mentally impaired woman was killed by the police right in San Jose, California. The weapon she was brandishing turned out to have been a power drill that had been painted to look like an assault weapon. Maybe, if the culture wasn’t running wild with illegal guns, the murder rate and gang activity so high in this locale — the police would have reacted differently. Yikes we sure don’t know and thank goodness don’t have to make those decisions every day.
Look the economy is still in the toilet for many Americans. Times are tough and income inequality still prevails. Funds have been cut from mental health services in many states, and unfortunately many are going untreated – proverbially falling through the cracks. Americans are nervous in this world of troubles. What’s going to happen to them? Is the US going back to war? And if so where – Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, or even Russia? Will folks be able to afford gasoline if this happens? Why are hybrids so expensive? Is the next airplane going to fall from the sky and where? What does it take to stay safe and keep your family safe? Sadly, this is the environment that allows racism and prejudice to fester and get a toe hold to dig in. Certainly, we know that we have got tough choices coming down the road. Turning the police into soldiers is not the answer as evidenced in Ferguson, Missouri; nor is denying generational family traditions. But maybe there’s just an opening big enough to consider enacting the simplest of laws that control the supply chain of weapons in this country. You know, we lived through Prohibition, and now track liquor and its sale. Marijuana is leaning toward legalization around the country. Can’t we step back from the random acts of violence in our streets, towns and cities? This might be the time to take action on gun control safety, and really turn a search light on what’s become of our public safety officers. We have to do better than this.
By: Michelle Kraus, The Hufington Post Blog, August 18, 2014
“When Moms Are Mad, They Vote!”: If Congress Continues To Ignore Mothers, And More Children Die, Cowards Of Capitol Hill Won’t Know What Hit Them
This past week, the nation mourned the passing of former White House Press Secretary James “The Bear” Brady, an American hero who stood up to the gun lobby despite being in a wheel chair, put there by a deranged gunman in a 1981 shooting.
Every day scores of Americans experience an “aha!” moment about our country’s lack of a sensible gun policy. Perhaps because they’re one of the 280 families impacted daily by gun violence, like Jim and Sarah Brady.
Brady’s shooting was not my “aha” moment. Nor was it Sarah Brady’s, either. While devastated by her husband’s injury, it was an incident four years later, involving their 6-year-old son that got her mad. As an outraged mother, Sarah volunteered for a gun violence prevention (GVP) organization working to pass a bill requiring background checks on gun sales by licensed dealers.
Sarah spent the next seven years inspiring mothers and others to pressure their congressmen to vote for the Brady bill. Passed in 1993, the Brady Law was not perfect: its gun show loopholes made it easy for the Columbine killers to acquire firearms in April of 1999 as well as for the shooter at the JCC day camp, a few months later.
That latter shooting 15 years ago this August 10 was my “aha!” moment.
A gunman stormed a California JCC day camp, spraying 70 bullets at campers, injuring five, including a teenage camp counselor trying to protect them. The campers who were shot that day were close in age to my two daughters, then 4 and 5 years old. The image of a daisy chain of young children being led away from the carnage — hit me hard.
Within three weeks, as a mom on a mission, I recruited 25 others to join me at a Labor Day news conference to announce that we were organizing a Million Mom March on Washington to take place the following Mother’s Day. Over the next nine months, hundreds of mothers spanning congressional districts across the country were calling on their elected officials. Many, like me, for the very first time.
Our ultimatum to Congress: act quickly to pass common sense legislation, or we would march en masse. Slowly but surely legions of women I’d never met were putting bus rentals on their personal credit cards. Others negotiated with airlines for steep discounts. One commandeered an entire Amtrak train, packed it with so many moms New York’s Penn Station dubbed it “The Million Mom March Express.”
On Mother’s Day, 2000, we marched on the National Mall and in 77 support protests with nearly a million supporters in tow. And when Congress still failed to act, in November, bands of urban and suburban mothers marched on to the polls, unseating several gun lobby stalwarts in the U.S. Senate. In Oregon and Colorado, mothers joined coalitions that succeeded in passing voter-approved referendums that closed the gun show loopholes in those gun-loving states.
But in one of the worse “group think” decisions ever, leaders of GVP movement deliberately delayed publicly touting our victories until the 2000 presidential race was decided. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court painfully chimed in more than a month later, handing the presidency to George W. Bush, the gun lobby had successfully spun a deceptive media narrative that the gun issue had cost Al Gore the presidency. The GVP movement never fully recovered its 2000 momentum.
Still, despite this huge misstep, we marched on to become a generation of activist mothers, like Sarah Brady, educating communities about gun violence prevention for many more years to come. A thankless job, but we did it for our children. Congress, on the other hand, refused to finish the job it started in 1993 by closing the loopholes in the Brady law.
Congress has its heroes who’ve tried to do right. But they’re repeatedly thwarted by colleagues terrified of a soulless gun lobby, unmoved by staggering statistics such as an estimated 1.5 million Americans have been injured or killed by a firearm in the last 15 years.
How much higher would the annual number of victims be if not for mothers advocating gun safety? I shudder to think. How much lower might it be if Congress had done its job years ago? That angers me to no end.
Twenty more children (and six brave educators) died on December 14th, 2012 at the hands of yet another deranged gunman at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. The 20 slaughtered kids were the same ages as those injured 15 years earlier at the JCC. Again, an eerily similar image of a Daisy chain of terrified kids being led to safety enraged mothers across the country. Except this time, this new generation of moms has a new tool: social media — a faster, cheaper way to educate an electorate.
Politics can be unpredictable. But this is certain. If Congress continues to ignore mothers, and more children die, the cowards of Capitol Hill will not know what hit them at the polls. For when moms are mad, they vote.
By: Donna Dees Thomases, Million Mom March Organizer; The Huffington Post Blog, August 7, 2014
“Our Blind Spot About Guns”: Politicians Should Be As Rational About Guns As They Are About Motor Vehicles
If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.
Instead, we’ve reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent — not by confiscating cars, but by regulating them and their drivers sensibly.
We could have said, “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” and there would have been an element of truth to that. Many accidents are a result of alcohol consumption, speeding, road rage or driver distraction. Or we could have said, “It’s pointless because even if you regulate cars, then people will just run each other down with bicycles,” and that, too, would have been partly true.
Yet, instead, we built a system that protects us from ourselves. This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of what we should do with guns in America.
Whenever I write about the need for sensible regulation of guns, some readers jeer: Cars kill people, too, so why not ban cars? Why are you so hypocritical as to try to take away guns from law-abiding people when you don’t seize cars?
That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.
One constraint, the argument goes, is the Second Amendment. Yet the paradox is that a bit more than a century ago, there was no universally recognized individual right to bear arms in the United States, but there was widely believed to be a “right to travel” that allowed people to drive cars without regulation.
A court struck down an early attempt to require driver’s licenses, and initial attempts to set speed limits or register vehicles were met with resistance and ridicule. When authorities in New York City sought in 1899 to ban horseless carriages in the parks, the idea was lambasted in The New York Times as “devoid of merit” and “impossible to maintain.”
Yet, over time, it became increasingly obvious that cars were killing and maiming people, as well as scaring horses and causing accidents. As a distinguished former congressman, Robert Cousins, put it in 1910: “Pedestrians are menaced every minute of the days and nights by a wanton recklessness of speed, crippling and killing people at a rate that is appalling.”
Courts and editorial writers alike saw the carnage and agreed that something must be done. By the 1920s, courts routinely accepted driver’s license requirements, car registration and other safety measures.
That continued in recent decades with requirements of seatbelts and air bags, padded dashboards and better bumpers. We cracked down on drunken drivers and instituted graduated licensing for young people, while also improving road engineering to reduce accidents. The upshot is that there is now just over 1 car fatality per 100 million miles driven.
Yet as we’ve learned to treat cars intelligently, we’ve gone in the opposite direction with guns. In his terrific new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, notes that “gun control laws were ubiquitous” in the 19th century. Visitors to Wichita, Kan., for example, were required to check their revolvers at police headquarters.
And Dodge City, symbol of the Wild West? A photo shows a sign on the main street in 1879 warning: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.”
The National Rifle Association supported reasonable gun control for most of its history and didn’t even oppose the landmark Gun Control Act of 1968. But, since then, most attempts at safety regulation have stalled or gone backward, and that makes the example of cars instructive.
“We didn’t ban cars, or send black helicopters to confiscate them,” notes Waldman. “We made cars safer: air bags, seatbelts, increasing the drinking age, lowering the speed limit. There are similar technological and behavioral fixes that can ease the toll of gun violence, from expanded background checks to trigger locks to smart guns that recognize a thumbprint, just like my iPhone does.”
Some of these should be doable. A Quinnipiac poll this month found 92 percent support for background checks for all gun buyers.
These steps won’t eliminate gun deaths any more than seatbelts eliminate auto deaths. But if a combination of measures could reduce the toll by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved every year.
A century ago, we reacted to deaths and injuries from unregulated vehicles by imposing sensible safety measures that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Why can’t we ask politicians to be just as rational about guns?
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 1, 2014
“Show Some Courage”: Survivors Call Out Cowardly GOP On Domestic Violence And Guns
Christy Martin is a legendary boxer. Since she started out at age 21, Martin has won 49 of her 57 total fights, with 31 KOs. She’s also a survivor of domestic abuse who was nearly murdered by her ex-husband four years ago. It’s the latter that brought her to Washington this week. In 2010, Martin was stabbed three times by the man she says had been threatening to kill her for 20 years. After stabbing her repeatedly, her ex-husband James Martin shot her and left her for dead. Martin survived by flagging down a passing car and begging to be taken to the hospital.
“As I lay there, I could hear the gurgling. I knew my lung had been ruptured, but I wasn’t dying fast enough,” Martin told MSNBC on Wednesday. “So he came back 3o minutes later and shot me with my own 9mm.”
Martin is just one of the women in Washington to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of a law that would tighten gun restrictions for domestic abusers in dating relationships and stalkers. A bill sponsored by Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar — the Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act — would close existing holes in background check laws that allow domestic abusers and stalkers to own guns.
The data on the correlation between domestic violence and gun deaths makes the gaps in policy frighteningly clear. More than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 — the year Martin was shot — were murdered by a current or former intimate partner. The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by 500 percent.
What Congress — particularly Republicans in Congress — has before it right now is an opportunity to enact meaningful gun reform that will save women’s lives. Around 50 women’s lives every month, to be precise. They’ve had and blown this opportunity before, when mass shootings have galvanized public support for common-sense proposals to keep people safe from deadly gun violence. The same support exists for restrictions that limit violent offenders’ ability to access guns. As Laura Bassett and Emily Swanson at the Huffington Post noted this week, Republican voters break with the National Rifle Association when it comes to restrictions on stalkers and domestic abusers:
More than two-thirds of GOP voters (68 percent) said they would support or strongly support a new law stripping guns from convicted stalkers, according to a new poll by The Huffington Post and YouGov. Fifty-nine percent of Republican voters, and two-thirds of voters overall, support expanding gun restrictions for convicted domestic abusers to include non-married dating partners.
The NRA has said it strongly opposes both proposals, which the Senate will consider on Wednesday in its first-ever hearing on gun violence against women. The gun lobby sent a letter to senators last month urging them to vote against Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) legislation to ban convicted stalkers and abusive dating partners from possessing guns. The letter claims that the bill “manipulates emotionally compelling issues such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘stalking’ simply to cast as wide a net as possible for federal firearm prohibitions.”
It remains to be seen what action Congress will take, and what the GOP will do in the face of strong support for change. They may just do what they’ve done before: ignore the issue. “There are so many people that just don’t realize what’s going on behind closed doors in their neighbor’s home. There are so many people who don’t understand domestic violence,” Martin explained on MSNBC. “It seems like if it’s not happening in our own home, then it’s just not happening.”
“Keeping guns out of the hands of abusers and stalkers will take more than a Senate hearing and carefully worded statements that say all the right things,” former Arizona representative and gun violence survivor Gabby Giffords wrote of the measure. “It will require our leaders to show some courage and stand up for common-sense laws. It will require some hard work. And it will require overcoming the power of those in Washington who continue to fight against these laws.”
By: Katie McDonough, Salon, July 30, 2014
“An Inept Congress”: Two Years After Aurora, Where’s The Gun Reform?
It’s been two years since the tragic Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, which killed 12 people and injured 70. But although many politicians, including President Obama, vowed that the nation would finally do something to strengthen gun regulations, Congress still hasn’t passed a single gun control law since. In fact, Congress hasn’t passed any major gun reform since 1994’s Assault Weapons Ban, which expired 10 years ago.
That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed, however. Months later, after the Newtown elementary school shooting in December 2012, the president set up a task force to address the issue. He promised to send Congress proposals for strengthening gun control, and he urged lawmakers to ban assault weapons, pass a universal background check law, and limit high-capacity ammunition clips.
He then signed 23 executive orders into law in January 2013. These included reducing barriers to background checks, researching the causes of gun violence, and improving mental health services. As Forbes explained at the time, “It does not appear that any of the executive orders would have any impact on the guns people currently own – or would like to purchase – and that all proposals regarding limiting the availability of assault weapons or large ammunition magazines will be proposed for congressional action.”
In other words, Congress still needed to act. In April 2013, the Senate voted to expand the background check system, a reform that 90 percent of Americans supported. But the amendment failed to to gain the 60 votes it needed to advance, due to pressure from the National Rifle Association and the lack of support from some red-state Democrats such as North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp.
President Obama called the vote “a shameful day in Washington.”
Obama took two more executive actions in August 2013. He banned military weapons that the United States had sold or given to allies from being imported back into the country. These weapons, however, are rarely used at crime scenes.
The president also attempted to close a loophole that allows felons and anyone else who can’t legally purchase a gun to register firearms to a corporation. The new rule requires anyone associated with that corporation to go through a background check. But that rule only applies to guns regulated under the National Firearms Act, which only regulates very deadly weapons such as machine guns.
Meanwhile, Congress still hasn’t passed any major gun legislation. The only step in the right direction was in May 2014, when the House passed an amendment that would increase funding for the country’s background check system.
In June, 163 House Democrats wrote an open letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), asking him to allow a vote on legislation to address gun violence. If he doesn’t allow a vote, it could resurface as a major issue in the midterms.
Even though there hasn’t been substantive national action to reduce gun violence, some states have taken gun control into their own hands.
Colorado’s state legislature passed laws that required universal background checks and limited gun magazines to 15 rounds of ammunition. Two Democratic state senators were recalled shortly thereafter, in an effort that was heavily supported by the NRA.
New York also passed new gun control and mental health laws. Other states have improved their background check systems, limited magazine capacity, and worked to prevent the mentally ill from accessing guns.
According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 64 laws have strengthened state gun regulations since the Newtown shootings, and 70 laws have weakened them.
By: Rachel Witkin, The National Memo, July 18, 2014
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