“Not Quite What Happened”: Sen. Joe Manchin’s Misreading Of Gun Control Politics
Senator Joe Manchin did an laudable job this year of trying to steer a bipartisan gun-control package through the Senate, despite being a Democrat representing a red state where hunting is very popular. And he may be called upon to do so again next year. But his comments about the politics of gun control yesterday on CNN’s “State of the Union” seem very wrong, and might bode poorly for the fate of gun control legislation next year:
What we found out is that people just didn’t trust government, that they were going to stop there. So they said hey Joe, we’re OK with the bill. We like the bill. The bill is not bad at all. We can live with that. But we just don’t trust government stopping and doing what we say we’re going to do.
That’s not quite what happened. Indeed, people liked the bill — very much. As proponents of the legislation often pointed out, support for universal background checks is around 90 percent and remained that high through the entire gun control debate.
It’s hard to find evidence for Manchin’s claim that the legislation failed because people didn’t “trust the government…to stop there.” An April 2013 Washington Post poll – at the height of the gun control debate — found that 55 percent of Americans thought it was possible to make new gun control laws without interfering with the rights of gun owners, with 38 percent thinking otherwise. Americans also said enacting new laws to reduce gun violence were more important than protecting the rights of gun owners, by a 52-40 margin, according to the polls.
And others, including a HuffPost/YouGov poll in September, found that 48 percent of Americans wanted gun laws that were more strict, compared with 16 percent who said less strict and 29 percent who wanted no change.
Now it’s certainly true that pro-gun groups liked to scaremonger about a “national gun registry” that would be used to take away the rights of gun-owners—but despite their best efforts, we still saw polls with broad, bipartisan support for the Manchin-Toomey legislation.
Manchin surely knows such claims are unfounded, since his own bill explicitly makes such a registry illegal, and since he regularly dismissed such concerns back in the spring. So it’s quite odd to see him retroactively validating those unfounded concerns now, and ascribing them to “most people” instead of misinformation by the gun industry and its political allies.
That’s troubling for the immediate future of gun control, because if Manchin really believes the public has spoken, that would be a much more intractable problem then simply fighting some industry misinformation and winning a couple more votes.
But this little episode also underscores a personal pet peeve: the tendency by many people, including those who work within the system and know better, to broadly and belatedly ascribe legislative outcomes as the obvious will of the voters. Gun control failed despite public support, because pro-gun groups are quite adept at lobbying (and spending money), and because many legislators feared primary challenges from pro-gun opponents. Even though it failed in Congress, it didn’t fail with the people.
Similarly, you might hear folks pontificating that the death of the public option during the debate over the Affordable Care Act shows that Americans aren’t ready for socialized health insurance—but the public option was extraordinarily popular with both conservatives and liberals, and was in fact one of the more popular parts of the bill. Our democracy doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to, and people who work in politics would be wise to remember that when assessing what went wrong and how to move forward.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post; December 23, 2013
“And The Shootings Continue”: 2013, The Year We Learned Gun Reform Is Impossible
Nothing in 2013 matched the horror of Sandy Hook or Aurora, but the year proved to be a dispiriting one for gun-control crusaders hoping to capitalize on the intense outpouring of grief wrought by 2012’s shooting massacres.
After Newtown, President Obama gave an impassioned speech promising to do everything in his power to prevent “more tragedies like this.” We’d watched these scenes of public mourning before—after Tucson, after Aurora—but it was different this time. Obama’s bold declaration that “we are not doing enough and we will have to change” seemed more forceful than before. And coming just six weeks after his reelection, it seemed more possible.
But once the National Rifle Association and others got a whiff of any serious threat to firearm freedoms, they moneyed up. Although gun-control groups spent five times as much on federal lobbying in 2013 as they did in 2012, according to data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, gun-rights groups outpaced them by more than 7-to-1.
As usual, the NRA’s efforts paid off. Watered-down legislation that would have expanded background checks failed in the Senate this past spring, and the issue retook its place in Congress as a perennial nonstarter.
And the shootings continued.
But Congress delivered gun-reform advocates one final 2013 disappointment this week. The Senate on Monday voted to renew the Undetectable Firearms Act just hours before the 25-year-old law was set to expire. The 10-year extension, which even the National Rifle Association endorsed, is largely genteel. It keeps on the books a ban on firearms that can sneak through metal detectors, but efforts by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to close what he called a “dangerous loophole” allowing a person to use 3-D printing technology to craft a plastic gun failed to get off the ground. Schumer wanted to amend the law to require that firearms have permanent metal pieces in them.
Gun-control advocates have seen some movement outside of Congress. In September, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz declared guns unwelcome in his stores, even in states with open-carry laws. Colorado’s State House passed stricter gun laws, though members did so at great political peril. Connecticut adopted some of the strictest in the nation, despite being home to several gun manufacturers. And Obama did pass a number of executive orders that make small inroads, such as restricting the import of military surplus weapons and ordering federal agencies to share more data with the background-check system.
But national lawmakers in 2013 did what they do every year when it comes to tightening gun restrictions: nothing.
“It should be a source of great embarrassment to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that we have not moved the ball forward one inch when it comes to the issue of protecting the thousands of people all across this country who are killed by guns every year,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., before Monday’s vote of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which passed by unanimous consent.
2012’s gun violence brought us unprecedented grief. But 2013 reminded us just how impossible it is to move that ball forward. If a deranged man killing 20 kids and six teachers at an elementary school won’t prompt meaningful gun reform, it’s hard to imagine what will.
By: Dustin Volz, The National Journal, December 10, 2013
“The Killer Who Supports Gun Control”: We Parade Through Life To The Relentless Drumbeat Of Death
A year ago, America was shocked by the murder of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But momentum to take action has faded, and we still lose that many lives to gun violence every eight hours on average.
The price of our gun policy can be seen in this breathtaking statistic: More Americans have died from guns here in the United States since 1970 (nearly 1.4 million) than American soldiers have died in all the wars in our country’s history over more than 200 years (about 1.2 million).
Those gun killings have been committed by people like John Lennon (his real name, but no relation to the Beatles star), who, in 2001, used an assault rifle to shoot an acquaintance dead in a quarrel over drugs. Lennon is now locked up at Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, N.Y., and he underscores that while people kill people, so do guns.
“I do take responsibility for the murder; I’m sorry for taking his life, and all the life he could have had,” Lennon writes in an essay that he sent me out of the blue and that I’ve published on my blog. “But without a gun, I would not have killed.”
Lennon says that only “that perfect killing machine” of a gun assured that the murder would succeed.
“Could I have stabbed him?” he adds. “Strangled him? Bludgeoned him? If I had done so and he hadn’t died, why would that have made me less culpable than I am now, a man who swiftly and cowardly shot another man to death? A killer nonetheless, I hash these things out, in my head, in my cell, in Attica serving 28 years to life.”
Lennon does not deny that people will still try to kill each other without guns. Indeed, he knows that firsthand, for he writes about being the target of a revenge attack:
“He sneaked upon me in the prison yard like I sneaked upon his friend in a Brooklyn street. When I turned, I saw his arm swing for my neck. I weaved. Then I felt the piercing blows, as he gripped my shirt and dug into my side. Pressured by the blood-thirsty crowd, he stabbed me six times because I shot his friend to death. The ice pick didn’t do the job, though. He got away with it because we were in a blind spot of the yard, and I never told on him. Prison ethics. While my assailant’s intent was clear, the weapon he had access to was insufficient. Therefore I lived.”
“It’s clear that the only reason I’m alive is because my assailant didn’t have his weapon of choice,” he adds. “Can you imagine if we had access to guns in prison?”
Lennon says that he has been tempted to commit suicide but that hanging himself — the best option in prison — is grim and difficult. So he settles for living. Indeed, he notes the irony that it is only because he is in a safe refuge without guns that he has not been murdered or killed himself; at large, he believes he would be dead.
In quoting a murderer and publishing an essay by him on my blog, I’m not diminishing his crime or romanticizing it. But Lennon speaks a blunt truth that Washington politicians too often avoid.
“I’m all for the market system,” Lennon says, “but when the products are killing machines, why shouldn’t we tighten measures to keep guns out of the hands of people like me?”
He’s right. Take cars, which are also potentially lethal instruments ubiquitous in America. We’ve undertaken a remarkable half-century effort to make automobiles far, far safer — and that is precisely the model for what we should do with guns. We’ve introduced seat belts, air bags, prominent brake lights and padded dashboards. We’ve cracked down on drunken drivers, improved road layouts and railings, introduced graduated licenses for young drivers and required insurance for drivers.
The upshot is that we have reduced the vehicle fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by more than 80 percent — so that firearms now claim more American lives each year than vehicles.
We need to approach gun safety in the same meticulous way we approach safety in motor vehicles and so many other aspects of life: It’s ridiculous that a cellphone can require a code to use, but a gun doesn’t.
One of the heroes at Sandy Hook was Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who was killed while trying to hide and protect her students. It would be nice if Washington could show a fraction of that courage, but instead, on this issue of guns, politicians display paralysis and fecklessness. So, as Lennon writes, and he should know: “we parade through life to the relentless drumbeat of death.”
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 14, 2013
“A Year After Newtown, Little Has Changed”: Don’t Blame Fate, Blame These Politicians
The first anniversary of the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School weighs heavily, above all, for the unfathomable nature of the crime and unfathomable grief of the families. Adding to that weight, though, is the demoralization over the fact that the massacre has not led to any broad national policy response to the problem of gun violence. If there is any doubt that this failure had exacerbated the pain of the families, consider this haunting line from one of the reports on the April failure of the post-massacre gun-law reform bill: “Mr. Obama hugged the brother of one victim, Daniel Barden, who was 7, and told him to take care of his mother, who was sobbing quietly.”
Since April, there has been all manner of rationalization and second-guessing about how this failure happened. The administration should never let itself get sidetracked by the gun issue to begin with. The president should have done more to push for the legislation, which was dubbed Manchin-Toomey. Or perhaps he should have done less. Maybe, though the Newtown families fell in line with the law enforcement and gun control groups who wanted expanded background checks, the bill should have focused more narrowly on reforms that directly addressed what had happened in Newtown.
In the coming New York Times Magazine, Robert Draper does us all a service by breaking through some of the second-guessing in order to analyze just how the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups managed to block a measure that polls showed were supported by some 90 percent of Americans. His conclusion is not so different from the one I reached, in slightly more optimistic tones, last spring: As confounding as the NRA’s win was, there’s reason to believe that, in “unsteady little increments,” its influence is being reduced.
However, even Draper’s deeply-reported look at the NRA runs the risk of diverting attention from this simple fact: Last April, 100 senators had the opportunity to vote on sensible gun-law reforms that many Newtown families were pleading for. And 46 of them decided to vote against it, which in the contemporary Senate was enough to kill the bill. Each vote counts the same, but here, for posterity’s sake, are some “no’s” that stood out in particular:
Kelly Ayotte
The first-term Republican from New Hampshire is a former prosecutor and state attorney general and thus well acquainted with the porousness of gun laws, which require background checks at licensed dealerships to screen for past felonies or dangerous mental illness, but not at the gun shows or private sales where an estimated 40 percent of transactions occur. Voting for background checks would hardly hurt Ayotte’s general election chances in New Hampshire, a state Obama won by six points against a part-time New Hampshire resident, which has prompted speculation that her vote was cast to protect her prospects for a national GOP ticket. Confronted after the vote by Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal, Ayotte gave a dissembling explanation that sent Lafferty striding from the room.
Max Baucus
The Montana Democrat has been allied with the NRA ever since voting for the 1994 assault weapons ban, an experience that he “felt he had paid dearly for,” according to a Baucus staffer quoted by Draper. Gun control supporters hoped they would get Baucus on this bill, though, given its moderation and the fact that he is nearing the end of his career – indeed, shortly after casting his vote, he announced that he is retiring. But he voted no nonetheless, a decision he explained thusly: “Montanans have told me loud and clear that they oppose any new gun controls.” These must not be the same Montanans who told pollsters, by a solid majority, that they backed expanded background checks, or the ones being listened to by Jon Tester, Baucus’s fellow Montana Democrat, who has many more elections ahead of him. He voted yes.
Jeff Flake
The freshman Republican from Arizona is quite conservative, but gun control advocates had high hopes for him because of his close relationship with his fellow Arizonan Gabrielle Giffords. When the congresswoman was shot in the head by a gunman in 2011, Flake was one of the first to rush to her side in the hospital. In early April, he sent a hand-written note to another Arizonan touched by gun violence, the mother of a young man killed in the Aurora cinema shooting, writing that “strengthening background checks is something we agree on.” In a Capitol hallway just before the vote, as the New York Times reported, “Ms. Giffords, who still struggles to speak because of the damage that a bullet did to her brain, grabbed Mr. Flake’s arm and tried — furiously and with difficulty — to say that she had needed his vote. The best she could get out was the word ‘need.’” She didn’t get it. Flake faced a serious backlash back home, but, not facing reelection until 2018, shrugged it off: “That’s the beauty of a six-year term.”
Heidi Heitkamp
The freshman Democrat from North Dakota hails from a red state, but does not face reelection again until 2018. That puts her in a similar position as Joe Donnelly, the conservative Democrat from Indiana. He voted for Manchin-Toomey. Heitkamp voted against it, citing the many phone calls she’d gotten against the bill: “I’ve heard overwhelmingly from the people of North Dakota; and at the end of the day my duty is to listen to and represent the people of North Dakota.” According to one poll, 79 percent of North Dakotans surveyed backed expanded background checks – a far higher rate than even in Montana.
Rob Portman
The Ohio Republican, George W. Bush’s former budget director, is considered one of the more moderate members of the Republican caucus, a reputation affirmed when he came out in support of same-sex marriage after learning that his son is gay. But, as Draper notes, it was this very announcement that helped set Portman against Manchin-Toomey:
Portman told [parents of slain Sandy Hook children who came to talk to him], “You know, I have an A rating from the N.R.A., so I’m probably not going to support this.” At some point, 13-year-old James Barden, a brother of one of the victims, spoke up. “Senator, there’s over a thousand deaths from gun violence in Ohio every year,” he said. “I’m here on behalf of my little brother, Daniel. Do you think that this bill would save some of those lives?”
Portman sat quietly for a moment. Then he said: “It could. It could.” But what the Republican senator did not say was that he had already disappointed conservatives by coming out in favor of same-sex marriage because of his openly gay son. By the spring of 2013 it had become axiomatic in the Senate that among the three incendiary social issues of the moment — gun restrictions, same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform — a moderate Democrat could afford to vote for two of them, and a conservative Republican only one. Portman had already selected his hot-button issue.
Also worth noting: having an A-rating from the NRA rating did not stop six other senators from backing the legislation, among them its co-sponsors, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, one of four Republicans to back the bill.
Mark Pryor
The Arkansas Democrat is up for reelection next year in a red state. That puts him in the same boat as Democrats Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. They voted for Manchin-Toomey nonetheless; he did not. Draper reports that Pryor was, like Baucus, haunted by the ghost of 1994, when his father, Senator David Pryor, voted for the assault weapons ban and “incurred the animus of the N.R.A.” But Pryor may have miscalculated – whereas Hagan and Landrieu enjoyed polling boosts from their vote for the bill, he did not, and all three now find themselves in trouble for unrelated reasons: the Obamacare rollout woes.
There are so many others that one could scrutinize as well: Ron Johnson and Dean Heller, Republicans from blue-state Wisconsin and Nevada; Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, who had declared a “sea change” in the politics of gun control after Newtown; Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who was leading the way in drafting a background-checks bill before a group to the right of the NRA started flooding his phones…All 46 had a choice and opted as they did.
I reached out to all of the above-mentioned no votes over the past two days to see if any of the senators were reassessing the issue and open to supporting a revised version of the bill. The only one that responded to the question on the record was the office of Senator Flake. Wrote his spokeswoman: “No, he’s not reassessing, and no, not open to a revised version.”
It’s not handwritten, but that Aurora mom Flake corresponded with surely gets the message.
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, December 12, 2013
“Who Needs A Gun?”: Most Of Us, Including Many Current Gun Owners, Don’t Have A Good Reason To Keep Guns In Their Homes
In September, Navy Yard; in November, a racially fraught shooting in Michigan and a proposed “stand-your-ground law” in Ohio; now the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre — there’s no avoiding the brutal reality of guns in America. Once again, we feel the need to say something, but we know the old arguments will get us nowhere. What’s the point of another impassioned plea or a new subtlety of constitutional law or further complex analyses of statistical data?
Our discussions typically start from the right to own a gun, go on to ask how, if at all, that right should be limited, and wind up with intractable disputes about the balance between the right and the harm that can come from exercising it. I suggest that we could make more progress if each of us asked a more direct and personal question: Should I own a gun?
A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.
Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.
Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good if I’m not trained to use it well. I may panic and shoot a family member coming home late, fumble around and allow an unarmed burglar to take my gun, have a cleaning or loading accident. The N.R.A. rightly sets high standards for gun safety. If those unable or unwilling to meet these standards gave up their guns, there might well be a lot fewer gun owners.
Guns do have uses other than defense against attackers. There may, for example, still be a few people who actually need to hunt to feed their families. But most hunting now is recreational and does not require keeping weapons at home. Hunters and their families would be much safer if the guns and ammunition were securely stored away from their homes and available only to those with licenses during the appropriate season. Target shooting, likewise, does not require keeping guns at home.
Finally, there’s the idea that citizens need guns so they can, if need be, oppose the force of a repressive government. Those who think there are current (or likely future) government actions in this country that would require armed resistance are living a paranoid fantasy. The idea that armed American citizens could stand up to our military is beyond fantasy.
Once we balance the potential harms and goods, most of us — including many current gun owners — don’t have a good reason to keep guns in their homes. This conclusion follows quite apart from whether we have a right to own guns or what restrictions should be put on this right. Also, the conclusion derives from what makes sense for each of us as individuals and so doesn’t require support from contested interpretations of statistical data.
I entirely realize that this line of thought will not convince the most impassioned gun supporters, who see owning guns as fundamental to their way of life. But about 70 million Americans own guns and only about four million belong to the N.R.A., which must include a large number of the most impassioned. So there’s reason to think that many gun owners would be open to reconsidering the dangers their weapons pose. Also, almost 30 percent of gun owners don’t think that guns make a household safer, and only 48 percent cite protection (rather than hunting, target shooting, etc.) as their main reason for having a gun.
It’s one thing to be horrified at gun violence. It’s something else to see it as a meaningful threat to your own existence. Our periodic shock at mass shootings and gang wars has little effect on our gun culture because most people don’t see guns as a particular threat to them. This is why opposition to gun violence has lacked the intense personal commitment of those who see guns as essential to their safety — or even their self-identity.
I’m not suggesting that opponents of gun violence abandon political action. We need to make it harder to buy guns (through background checks, waiting periods, etc.) both for those with criminal intentions and for law-abiding citizens who have no real need. But on the most basic level, much of our deadly violence occurs because we so often have guns readily available. Their mere presence makes suicide, domestic violence and accidents more likely. The fewer people with guns at hand, the less gun violence.
It’s easier to get people to see that they don’t want something than that they don’t have a right to it. Focusing on the need rather than the right to own a gun, many may well conclude that for them a gun is more a danger than a protection. Those fewer guns will make for a safer country.
By: Gary Gutting, The New York Times, December 10, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 