“How Many Massacres Are Enough?”: National Gun Fever Shows No Sign Of Breaking
Apparently, there will be no ban on assault weapons.
Never mind that Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault-type rifle to rip apart the bodies of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Forget the fact that James E. Holmes, the alleged Aurora, CO, movie theater shooter, fired, among other weapons, an AR-15.
Nor does it seem to make any difference that Jared Loughner — the man who shot Gabby Giffords and killed six others, including a 9-year-old girl — used a high-capacity magazine that the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban rendered illegal. A high-capacity magazine also enabled the massacre committed by Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.
The political climate has changed since the 1994 ban: Democrats have cowered before the gun lobby; the National Rifle Association has grown even more extreme; the U.S. Supreme Court has moved much further to the right. And, in the 20 years since Congress banned assault-type weapons and high-capacity magazines, Americans have heard a steady drumbeat of pro-firearms rhetoric that fetishizes the Second Amendment. In other words, the climate around firearms has gotten crazier.
Even before the current debate over more restrictive gun laws began, most political observers knew it would be difficult to get Congress to stand up to the firearms lobby. So it’s no great surprise that Majority Leader Harry Reid, who runs from the shadow of the National Rifle Association, slammed the door on Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s effort to re-up the assault-weapons ban.
Still, I find myself once again wondering just how bad things have to get before the fever breaks — before the country comes to its senses on firearms. We’re in the throes of a kind of madness, a mass delusion that assigns to firearms the significance of religious totems.
Many critics of an assault-weapons ban note that it would not provide any magical cure-all for the mass shootings that have plagued us over the years since Columbine. That’s certainly true. But banning at least some assault-type weapons and the high-capacity magazines that feed them would be a step in the right direction. Why can’t we take that step?
What would be wrong with reinstituting a ban? For 10 years — from 1994-2004 — an imperfect ban prohibited the sale of certain types of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. It covered only new weapons; old ones were grandfathered in, so those already in existence were available to criminals, the mentally unstable and the impulse-control-challenged. The original ban didn’t prohibit easy modifications or cosmetic changes that allowed gun owners and manufactures to practically duplicate outlawed weapons. So the old law was hardly perfect.
But many law enforcement officials nevertheless supported it, declaring that it helped. It didn’t end gun violence or stop mass murders or prevent suicides (which account for two-thirds of gun deaths in this country). But it prevented some killings. Isn’t that worthwhile?
And the Clinton-era ban accomplished that without infringing on the rights of gun owners. They could still hunt game, protect their homes and enjoy firearms on gun ranges. The civilized world did not come to an end during those 10 years; the Second Amendment was not besmirched.
Yet, the vociferous — nay, deranged — leadership of the NRA has persuaded Congress that an assault-weapons ban is akin to totalitarianism. More important, it has persuaded Democrats that it has the power to end their political careers if they don’t carry water for the gun lobby. After Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, he and other Democrats blamed the loss partly on support for tougher gun laws. And the NRA was only too happy to take credit.
That was nonsense, of course. Gore won the popular vote and would have won the Electoral College, as well, if the ballots had been properly counted in Florida. Besides, he has only himself to blame for being a lousy candidate. But none of that seems to matter now because conventional wisdom has rewritten history.
If dead innocents — their bodies ripped apart by bullets from an assault weapon — couldn’t persuade Congress to ban at least some of those firearms and the high-capacity magazines that feed them, the cause is lost. So is our common sense.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, March 23, 2013
“Flying Under The Radar”: Senators Quietly Do The NRA’s Bidding In Spending Bill
Most lawmakers in both parties believe there will not be a government shutdown in two weeks, but to avoid one, Congress will need to pass something called a continuing resolution. It’s a temporary spending bill that will keep the government’s lights on through the end of the fiscal year. The House has already passed its version and the Senate is advancing its alternative.
Ordinarily, you might think the partisan disputes over the stopgap bill would be over spending levels and possible cuts, but as it turns out, the most contentious issue might be, of all things, gun policy. The New York Times reports that some unnamed lawmakers “quietly” added some “temporary gun-rights provisions largely favored by Republicans” to the CR.
The provisions, which have been renewed separately at various points, would prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from requiring gun dealers to conduct annual inventories to ensure that they have not lost guns or had them stolen, and would retain a broad definition of “antique” guns that can be imported into the United States outside of normal regulations.
Another amendment would prevent the A.T.F. from refusing to renew a dealer’s license for lack of business; many licensed dealers who are not actively engaged in selling firearms can now obtain a license to sell guns and often fly under the radar of the agency and other law enforcement officials, which gun control advocates argue leads to a freer flow of illegal guns.
A final measure would require the bureau to attach a disclaimer to data about guns to indicate that it “cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about firearms-related crimes.”
Keep in mind, it’s pretty tough to defend the provisions in question. What’s wrong, for example, with having gun dealers conduct inventories to make sure firearms haven’t been lost or stolen? I don’t know, but under a Republican measure in the temporary spending bill, the ATF would be prohibited from enforcing this basic regulation.
Also note, some of these ideas aren’t new — they’ve been temporary policies included in previous spending bills — but the new GOP-backed proposals make the policies permanent.
What’s worse, these provisions appear likely to pass because Senate Democrats see related measures in the House bill as even worse.
[A Democratic Senate] aide characterized the permanent provisions as a trade-off in negotiations that occurred late last year with House appropriators, who had sought to make additional gun-related riders permanent in the continuing resolution. Other riders — such as one banning the activities of the ATF from being transferred to another government entity, such as the more powerful FBI — are included in the Senate bill but not on a permanent basis.
According to the Senate aide, House appropriators also sought to include another provision that Democrats and the White House viewed as far more objectionable. […]
Although the Senate’s gun language was agreed to late last year — before the fatal shooting of 20 first-graders at a Connecticut elementary school — gun-control advocates and some Democratic members of Congress said the deal now looks like poor timing. They said it undermines a concurrent effort in both chambers to crack down on gun violence.
Third Way’s Jim Kessler, a former aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), told Roll Call, “It shows that the NRA is always on offense and rarely on defense. Even in a very adverse situation for them, in which many in Congress and the White House are trying to do something constructive to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people, the NRA continues to advance its agenda.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 15, 2013
“Changing The Legal Paradigm”: NRA Money Helped Reshape Gun Laws
In 1977 at a Denver hotel, Don Kates paced a conference room lecturing a small group of young scholars about the Second Amendment and tossing out ideas for law review articles. Back then, it was a pretty weird activity in pursuit of a wacky notion: that the Constitution confers an individual right to possess a firearm.
“This idea for a very long time was just laughed at,” said Nelson Lund, the Patrick Henry professor of constitutional law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University, a chair endowed by the National Rifle Association. “A lot of people thought it was preposterous and just propaganda from gun nuts.”
More than 35 years later, no one is laughing. In 2008, the Supreme Court endorsed for the first time an individual’s right to own a gun in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. The 5 to 4 decision rendered ineffective some of the District’s strict gun-control laws. And Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion echoed the work of Kates and his ideological comrades, who had pressed the argument that the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to keep and bear arms.
As the Obama administration pushes for gun-control legislation, it will have to contend with the changed legal understanding of the Second Amendment that culminated in Heller. That transformation was brought about in large part by a small band of lawyers and scholars backed by the NRA.
For more than three decades, the NRA has sponsored legal seminars, funded legal research and encouraged law review articles that advocate an individual’s right to possess guns, according to the organization’s reports. The result has been a profound shift in legal thinking on the Second Amendment. And the issue of individual gun-possession rights, once almost entirely ignored, has moved into the center of constitutional debate and study.
For proponents of stricter gun control, the NRA’s encouragement of favorable legal scholarship has been a mark of its strategic, patient advocacy.
“I think this was one of the most successful attempts to change the law and to change a legal paradigm in history,” said Carl T. Bogus, a professor at Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island and the editor of “The Second Amendment in Law and History,” a collection of essays that challenges the interpretation of the individual right. “They were thinking strategically. I don’t think the NRA funds scholarship out of academic interest. I think the NRA funds something because it has a political objective.”
The Second Amendment states: “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.” Before the Heller decision, the Supreme Court and lower courts had interpreted the language as “preserving the authority of the states to maintain militias,” according to a Congressional Research Service analysis.
“It was a settled question, and the overwhelming consensus, bordering on unanimity, was that the Second Amendment granted a collective right” enjoyed by the states, not individuals, Bogus said. Under this interpretation, the Constitution provides no right for an individual to possess a firearm.
Lund agreed that there was a consensus but said it was “based on ignorance.”
Throughout most of American history, there was little academic interest in the Second Amendment. From 1912 to 1959, only 11 law journal articles were published on the subject, all of them endorsing the prevailing opinion that it “affects citizens only in connection with citizen service in a government-organized and -regulated militia,” according to an analysis by Robert J. Spitzer, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Cortland and the author of “The Politics of Gun Control.”
The first articles advocating an individual right appeared in the 1960s, and scholarship endorsing that view took off in the late 1970s. From 1980 to 1989, as NRA support began to be felt, 38 articles on the Second Amendment were published in academic journals, 21 of which advocated an individual right. In the following decade, 87 articles appeared, and a clear majority — 58 to 29 — took an individual-rights position, Spitzer’s analysis showed.
To Kates, the explanation for the burgeoning scholarship is obvious. “Gun control became a matter of enormous political controversy, and this focused attention on the Second Amendment,” he said in an interview.
Kates, a Yale Law graduate who describes himself as a liberal, said he began carrying a gun when he spent the summer of 1963 as a civil rights worker in eastern North Carolina.
“I never believed the nonsense that was then current that the Second Amendment had to do with states’ rights,” he said. Alarmed by calls for stricter gun control and outright bans, Kates started the seminars in the late 1970s and ran them for more than a decade with support from various groups, including the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation, another gun rights organization.
Stephen P. Halbrook attended the Denver seminar in 1977 when he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Howard University and studying for a law degree at Georgetown. Three years later, he published his first article on the Second Amendment in the George Mason University Law Review. He went on to publish more than 20 law review articles and four books dealing with the Second Amendment, some with grants from the NRA, where he has served as an outside counsel.
Halbrook, who has a law office in Fairfax city, said the NRA started funding scholarly research. “I would think that’s important in the sense that scholars, unless you’re independently wealthy, you need to be paid for your time,” he said.
He and others noted that Bogus has received outside funding for symposia and publishing that excludes the individual-rights point of view. Bogus said he was transparent about his funding.
The NRA also began essay competitions for law students with prizes of up to $12,500, with the understanding that the winners would try to place their work in a law review.
Halbrook was one of a number of lawyers — including Kates; Dave Hardy, a legal consultant for the NRA; and David Caplan, a member of the NRA’s board of directors — who were at the forefront of this writing. They drew on their reading of colonial history, the founders’ statements and early American constitutional history to make their case for an individual right.
Hardy said most of this work was published in minor reviews, but the individual-rights argument got a big boost in 1989 when Sanford Levinson, a leading professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas at Austin, published “The Embarrassing Second Amendment” in the Yale Law Journal. He argued that the “legal consciousness of the elite bar” on the Second Amendment might be wrong. He also was sympathetic to the “insurrectionist theory” that citizens have a right to be armed so they can fight their government if it becomes tyrannical. Levinson singled out Kates’s work and cited Halbrook.
Other leading scholars followed, and advocates for the NRA’s position began to speak about a new “standard model.” In 1997, Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged the growing mass of law review material when he wrote, “Marshaling an impressive array of historical evidence, a growing body of scholarly commentary indicates that the ‘right to keep and bear arms’ is, as the Amendment text suggests, a personal right.”
In 2003, the NRA marked the Second Amendment’s new stature as a subject of serious study when its foundation endowed Lund’s Patrick Henry chair at George Mason University with $1 million. The law school had established a reputation as a bastion of conservative legal thought.
“What they were looking for was a means of legitimating the fact that the Second Amendment had arrived as a legitimate subject of study in constitutional law,” said Daniel D. Polsby, the dean of the George Mason University School of Law.
For advocates of an individual’s right to bear arms, the Heller decision in 2008 was a vindication. In writing the majority opinion, Scalia said, “The second amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
He cited Kates and Halbrook.
By: Peter Finn, The Washington Post, March 13, 2013
“Common Sense Is Not So Common”: Universal Background Checks A First Step On Gun Violence
For the better part of 20 years, I have lived and worked in Washington, D.C., an urban metropolis once dubbed “the violence capital of America” by the Economist. I was born and raised, however, in Alaska, a largely rural state, where guns are an intricate part of its hunting culture and often necessary for survival.
I have lived and witnessed both sides of the gun control debate with my family and my friends, and I have sought to understand the valid points of each. My family believes that guns are to be used responsibly for hunting, sport, recreation and protection. My friends living in Washington, D.C., and other urban areas fervently believe that banning and restricting the use and flow of guns will reduce gun violence.
This past week, while visiting my family in Alaska, I attended my first gun show. I wasn’t sure what to expect and did see my share of interesting characters: One woman was carrying her AR-15 like it was a Gucci purse, and camo-chic was definitely the preferred attire, along with military bunny boots and Carhart coveralls. But what struck me most was that vendors were not professional dealers with slick advertisements, instead they were everyday citizens simply looking to sell their wares: Colt 45s, Glock revolvers, hunting knives, bear traps and the increasingly popular AR-15. As one vendor told me, “President Obama should be given the ‘gun dealer of the year’ award for increasing the sales of the AR-15.”
At the show, one could sense the ingrained culture surrounding gun ownership from both the vendors and attendees. They were patriotic, law-abiding citizens who want their constitutional rights to be respected and preserved and to protect their family and allow them to hunt the land.
Unfortunately, not everyone in possession of a gun is a law-abiding citizen. Law enforcement is asking for additional tools, such as the ability to have background checks conducted on all sales and to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Today, two out of every five guns sold in the U.S. change hands without a background check. In nine of 10 gun crimes, the gun used was not owned by the original purchaser.
Since the Brady Law took effect, which requires background checks on purchases from a federal licensed dealer, 172 million Americans have been subjected to background checks and 1.3 million criminals and other prohibited purchasers have been stopped from buying guns. In the three of the five states that host the most gun shows, Illinois, Pennsylvania and California, the “gun show loophole” was closed, requiring universal background checks on gun sales by unlicensed and private dealers, proving they can be done efficiently without harm to business.
In January, both Gallup and Fox News polls showed separately, that 91 percent of Americans favored universal background checks on all gun purchases with as many as 77 percent of National Rifle Association members supported the checks.
Ultimately, we must acknowledge the root cause and seek to change our nation’s heart and attitude toward the preciousness of life and not default to having violence solve our problems. My dad recently lamented that, “Until there is a societal attitude about the great value of each individual life, the carnage will continue.”
In the meantime, implementing universal background checks that preserve the rights of law-abiding citizens while denying those who target the innocent to perpetrate evil seems like a balanced, common sense first step.
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2013
“A Direct Correlation”: Stricter Gun Laws Mean Fewer Fatalities
A study released last week by JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association): Internal Medicine shows a direct correlation between gun laws and gun-related fatalities. While the study is mainly based on the number of gun laws, not the type (it doesn’t, for example, specify which particular laws are the most effective), it confirms that generally speaking, stricter gun laws result in fewer deaths.
The report, entitled “Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Fatalities in the United States,” developed a method for rating states depending on the degree of the gun laws in place. How far state laws go to control gun trafficking, effectiveness of a background-check system, focus on child safety, restriction on military-style assault weapons, and whether state laws allow individuals to carry guns in public places were all considered when ranking each state.
The states that come in at the top of the list for strong gun laws are Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York. Aside from California, which is closer to the median, these states also have the lowest average of firearms deaths per year. The states on the other end of the list—those with the most lenient gun laws—include Alaska, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Utah, all of which have among the highest percentage of deaths per year.
The authors conclude from their data that just owning a gun puts individuals at risk, and the federal government should focus on limiting gun ownership entirely. “One way that firearm legislation may act to reduce firearm fatalities is through reducing firearm prevalence. Studies have shown a strong connection between gun ownership and firearm suicide and firearm homicide,” says the report. “A cross-sectional study of all 50 states from 2001 to 2003 found that higher rates of household firearm ownership were associated with significantly higher rates of homicide.”
The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre has stood adamantly against the implementation of new federal gun laws, citing these measures as an all-out attack on responsible gun owners with a view to taking away their guns, and a complete waste of time since the government fails to enforce laws already in place. LaPierre has completely ignored and opposed proposals that include universal background checks, banning military-style weapons, and outlawing high-capacity magazines. During an interview, the NRA CEO tried to shift blame for growing gun violence when he said, “Look, a gun is a tool. The problem is the criminal.”
At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), LaPierre said, “Across the board, violent crime in jurisdictions that recognize the right to carry is lower than in areas that prevent it.” During a January Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) repeated this statement nearly verbatim. The problem with this logic is that there are far too many exceptions when piecing together a direct connection between any one lax gun law and a decrease in gun-related violence—other factors in society can trigger an increase or decrease.
The JAMA study focuses on gun-related fatalities, as opposed to gun-related violence. It also doesn’t delve into the specificity of each law, but instead measures the efficacy of all gun laws in each respective state by assigning one point for every law passed, all while taking into consideration the magnitude of the laws and the state’s demographic data.
Read the results of the study here.
A 2004 study by The National Academies Press called “Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review” shows that since the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (which expired in 2004) was passed, total murder rates and handgun murder rates have declined considerably.
In the 1990s, Congress voted to reduce funding for the Centers for Disease Control, a leading research source on gun control. Before the funding was cut, the CDC found that having a gun in the home put families at a far higher risk for suicide and homicide. President Obama signed an executive order that provides funding to the CDC for this type of research, which is telling of the president’s commitment to passing effective, sensible legislation.
LaPierre, Sen. Cruz, and other opponents of stricter gun laws can make claims that more lenient gun laws lead to a decrease in gun violence, but the data to support those claims is plainly non-existent. The JAMA study reiterates what a recent Quinnipiac University poll points out: A majority of Americans support stricter gun laws despite opposition from the NRA and NRA-funded Republicans—and it’s in the people’s best interests to do so.
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, March 10, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 