“A Willingness To Say Things That Aren’t True”: The Facts Kelly Ayotte Doesn’t Want Her Constituents To Know
When the bipartisan compromise on expanded background checks died two weeks ago at the hands of a Republican filibuster, only one senator from New England voted to kill the bill: New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte (R).
This week, as Ayotte returns to the Granite State, many of her constituents are expressing their dissatisfaction. Take this town-hall meeting today, for example.
When another man rose to ask Ayotte to explain why she voted against expanding background checks, several people in the audience of more than 250 people applauded.
“I know people have strong feelings about this issue,” Ayotte began. She said she voted against the bipartisan compromise on background checks last month because she believed gun owners would face an undue burden and she feared it could lead to a federal gun registry.
What bothers me about the senator’s response is how wrong it is. The “undue burden” Ayotte is worried about adds a few minutes to gun purchases, and it already applies to existing firearm sales in gun stores. If it helps prevents gun violence, why is it “undue”?
More importantly, the fears of a possible federal gun registry are ridiculous. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, there is no federal registry. The proposed measure explicitly prohibits a federal registry. Under the bill, anyone even trying to create a federal registry would be a felon, subject to 15 years behind bars. No one has even proposed the possibility of a federal registry.
The irony is, if Ayotte was worried about a possible registry, she should have loved the compromise plan — it strengthened the prohibition on the very registry she’s so worried about.
And best of all, Ayotte surely knows this. The U.S. senator has had two weeks to think of an excuse and the best she can come up with are talking points she knows aren’t true.
Have I mentioned lately how difficult it is to have a serious policy debate when those engaged in the discussion are willing to say things that aren’t true?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 2, 2013
“The Jan Brewer Cycle Of Death”: Turning The Gun-Buyback Model On Its Ear
I’m not an expert in gun buyback programs, but the basic idea seems pretty straightforward. In the hopes of getting more guns off the streets, there are organized events in which members of the public bring their firearms, and exchange them for cash. They’re usually publicly funded, though as Rachel noted on the show in March, some are privately financed.
But what matters is the point of the programs: removing guns from circulation. It’s possible Arizona Republicans find this confusing.
Arizona cities and counties that hold community gun buyback events will have to sell the surrendered weapons instead of destroying them under a bill Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Monday.
The bill was championed by Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature who argued that municipalities were skirting a 2010 law that was tightened last year and requires police to sell seized weapons to federally licensed dealers. They argued that destroying property turned over to the government is a waste of taxpayer resources.
Hmm. Let’s say a local sheriff’s office in Arizona wants to reduce gun violence in its community by getting more guns off the streets. The sheriff decides to do this through a gun buyback program, encouraging local citizens to participate in exchange for money, helping to keep weapons out of the hands of children and criminals. The guns are then destroyed.
Under a new law championed by state Republicans, however, that sheriff’s office can’t destroy the guns — the firearms collected during the buyback will instead be brought to gun stores, where they then can be sold and put back on the streets.
The Arizona GOP wants to turn gun buyback programs into gun recycling programs — watch the assault rifle go from the street … to the police … to the gun dealers … back to the street.
Let’s all marvel at the cycle of life, or more accurately in this case, death.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 30, 2013
“A Double-Barreled Standard”: When We Say “Never Again” About Terrorism, We Mean It, But Not About Gun Violence
The nation demonstrated again last week how resolute it can be when threatened by murderous terrorists — and how helpless when ordered to heel by smug lobbyists for the gun industry.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s deadly rampage through the Boston area provoked not fear but defiance. Even before one brother was killed and the other captured, the city was impatient to get back to normal, eager to show the world that unspeakable violence might shock, sadden and enrage but never intimidate. “Sweet Caroline,” the eighth-inning singalong at Fenway Park, became an unlikely anthem of unity and resistance.
The Obama administration decided Monday to charge the younger Tsarnaev , in custody at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, under criminal statutes rather than as an “enemy combatant.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and some others will disapprove, but this is really an issue of semantics. No one has argued for kid gloves and leniency.
There is also the unanswered question of whether the Tsarnaev brothers had contact with some terrorist organization or acted alone. I have no doubt that authorities will find out. No stone will be unturned, not just in Cambridge and Watertown, Mass., but in the remote vastness of Chechnya and Dagestan as well. The brothers’ relatives and acquaintances will be interviewed, their movements traced, their Internet habits minutely examined for any possible clue.
Can the Tsarnaevs’ motive be described as “Islamist,” and would that be in a religious or cultural sense? When Russian security officials flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for scrutiny, did the FBI drop the ball? Are there telltale patterns of behavior that hint at dangerous self-radicalization? Or is this tragedy more like Columbine, an unfathomable orgy of death?
It may be, in the end, that there simply was no way that authorities could have anticipated and prevented the bombing of the Boston Marathon. But rest assured that we will move heaven and earth looking for answers. Since the 9/11 attacks, we have demonstrated that when alienated young men who are foreign-born and Muslim kill innocents, we will do anything in our power to keep such atrocities from happening again.
Shamefully, however, we have also shown that when alienated young men who are not foreign-born or Muslim do the same, we are powerless.
It is inescapably ironic that while Boston was under siege last week, the Senate was busy rejecting a measure that would have mandated near-universal background checks for gun purchases nationwide — legislation prompted by the massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Gun violence costs 30,000 lives in this country each year. Other steps proposed after Newtown — such as reimposition of a ban on military-style assault weapons and large-capacity magazines — were deemed too much to hope for. But expanded background checks once had the support of the powerful National Rifle Association, and experts considered them potentially the most effective way of keeping deadly weapons out of the wrong hands. They might not have prevented the last senseless mass shooting, but might prevent the next.
However, the NRA changed its position on background checks to “never” and dug in its heels, threatening to punish senators who voted in favor. And so, despite polls showing that up to 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could not muster the 60 votes needed to move the legislation forward.
Some critics say President Obama didn’t push hard enough for action on gun violence, didn’t twist enough arms or slap enough backs. Some say Reid could have done more to keep red-state Democrats in the fold. Some say the barrier arises from the architecture of the Constitution, which gives Montana’s 1 million residents the same number of senators as California’s 38 million.
There are lots of explanations for the failure of legislation on background checks, but no good reasons.
Imagine what our laws would be like if the nation were losing 30,000 lives each year to Islamist terrorism. Do you think for one minute that a young man named, say, Abdullah or Hussein — or Tsarnaev — would be able to go to a gun show and buy a semiautomatic AR-15 knockoff with a 30-round clip, no questions asked? Would the NRA still argue, as it essentially does now, that those thousands of lives are the price we must pay for the Second Amendment?
When we say “never again” about terrorism, we really mean it. When we say those words about gun violence, obviously we really don’t.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 22, 2013
“We Couldn’t Care Less”: The Gun Lobby’s Fanaticism Prevails Over Common Sense
You might have thought that the mangled bodies of 20 dead children would have been enough to overcome the crazed obsessions of the gun lobby.
You might have believed that the courage and exhortations of a former congresswoman — her career cut short and her life forever changed by a would-be assassin’s bullet — would have pushed Congress to do the right thing.
You might have reasoned that polls showing overwhelming public support for a sensible gun control measure would have persuaded politicians to take a modest step toward preventing more massacres.
You would have been wrong. Last week, the U.S. Senate sent a stark message to the citizens it is elected to represent: We couldn’t care less about what you want.
Fifteen years of highly publicized mass murders carried out by madmen with firearms — Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson and Aurora, to name just a few — have changed nothing. Newtown, where 26 people, including 20 young children, were mowed down by a man armed with an assault-type weapon and high-capacity magazines for his ammo, provoked little more than a ripple in the corridors of Washington, where the National Rifle Association and its like-minded lobbies carried the day.
The grip that the gun lobby maintains on Congress is hard to explain. The National Rifle Association has persuaded spineless politicians that it is an omnipotent election god, able to strike down those who don’t cower before it. That’s simply not true, but even if it were, aren’t some principles worth losing elections over?
The proposal that appeared to have the best chance of passage last week was modest enough. It would simply have expanded criminal background checks to include guns sold at gun shows and via the Internet, a step supported by 90 percent of Americans, according to polls.
As its proponents conceded, it would not have stopped the Newtown atrocity. Adam Lanza took his mother’s legally purchased weapons to kill her, to carry out a massacre and to then commit suicide.
But expanded background checks would certainly save other lives, since violent husbands and other criminals have been able to saunter through huge holes in the system to purchase guns. Speaking with justifiable anger after the background-check measure went down to defeat, President Obama noted, “… if action by Congress could have saved one person, one child, a few hundred, a few thousand … we had an obligation to try.”
In an exhaustive report last week about online purchases of firearms, The New York Times showed clearly why expanded background checks are needed. As the newspaper noted, websites for firearms function as “unregulated bazaars” where sellers offer prospective buyers the following assurance: “no questions asked.” Reporters found persons with criminal records buying and selling guns.
It is infuriating that the gun lobby defeated a proposal to rein in that dangerous commerce. And, as usual, it defended its opposition with a lie: The amendment would have led to a national registry of guns, just a slippery slope away from confiscation.
While many discussions of the gun lobby’s fanaticism include a nod to the country’s frontier origins, it’s a mistake to believe this craziness is rooted in history. The lunacy from Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, has a more recent provenance.
When I was a child in Alabama — the daughter and niece of hunting enthusiasts — gun owners didn’t demand the right to take their weapons into church or bars or onto college campuses.
But as hunting has become less popular and as the number of households owning guns has declined, the ranks of gun owners have become over-represented by conspiracy theorists and assorted crazies and kooks. They can be easily persuaded that the government is on a mission to confiscate their firearms.
There is little doubt that paranoia is amplified by the presence of a black president, who represents the deepest fears of right-wing survivalist types. So it was probably naive to expect that he could drum up support for more reasonable gun safety measures.
But if 20 dead children can’t persuade Congress to tighten gun laws, what will?
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, April 20, 2013
“The Mass Murder Lobby”: How The NRA Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation
The intense hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers illustrates another way that the National Rifle Association helps mass murderers — by delaying how quickly they can be identified.
The inability to quickly track the gunpowders in the Boston bombs is due to government policy designed and promoted by the NRA, which has found a way to transform every massacre associated with weapons into an opportunity for the munitions companies that sustain it to sell more guns, gunpowder and bullets.
The price for such delays was put on terrible display Friday morning when the two brothers, who had been caught on video placing the bombs, killed one police officer, wounded another and carjacked a motorist, creating conditions so unsafe that the 7th largest population center in America spent Friday on lockdown.
But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.
Had the suspects in the Boston bombings killed by slipping poison into bottled water or canned food at a factory, or lacing spinach in a field with a deadly chemical, it would have taken only minutes to a few hours to identify exactly where that food was manufactured and how it moved through the food chain. That would have quickly narrowed the search for suspects.
With many food products you can use a smartphone app to scan the product’s barcode and learn where, when and by what company the product was made. Cans and bottles also come with codes printed or stamped on them to help stop foodborne illness by tracking products to their source.
“With almost any food these days you can quickly track it from the source to the store where it was sold,” according to Bill Marler, a Seattle litigator who specializes in food safety cases and sponsors the website Food Safety News.
Had the Boston bombers used a plastic explosive, it would have included identifiers that would have allowed a quick trace. Those taggants exist because the NRA does not oppose them.
Why is that? Why this breach in the NRA’s Maginot Line of defense against reasonable regulation of guns and ammunition?
The answer appears to lie in who makes plastic explosives like Semtx, which was used to bring down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The world’s main supplier was not a company that finances the NRA, but Libya under Moammar Khadafy.
That this one breach in NRA policy traces directly to the economic interests of the American munitions industry provides powerful evidence of what motivates the NRA – profits.
That the gun makers have managed to turn each massacre into a spike in sales of both expensive rapid-fire weapons and ammunition adds to the evidence that the NRA should be viewed as the mass-murder lobby.
The major source of plastic explosives may also be significant in understanding the NRA’s willingness to go along with taggants for plastic explosives, which are much more powerful than gunpowder.
But gunpowder, like guns, are extremely difficult to trace because for more than three decades the NRA has fought to make sure it’s difficult to almost impossible to do.
That difficulty results not from the technical issues at hand, though the NRA tries to make people think that’s the case by mischaracterizing a 1980 government report.
In the case of guns, the NRA claims anything remotely resembling a gun registry or a national database tracking guns from manufacturer to retail sale would help the government disarm the citizenry. In this the NRA fuels the fantasy that in the event the American government turned on the people, bands of armed patriots could defeat the military with its trained soldiers, aircraft, drones, advanced weaponry and communications.
Iraqi households almost all had guns, too, but that did not protect them from their country’s military or the invading American-led ground forces a decade ago.
Bombs have long been used in America for personal, criminal and political purposes. The frequency of bombings may surprise many people given the intense focus on the Boston bombs.
Roughly 5,000 bombings and attempted bombings are reported in the U.S. each year, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reports.
The ATF data, like that the FBI gathers, takes a broad measure, counting bombs made from matchsticks as well as dynamite.
The level of reported bombings in 2011 and 2012 was triple the number compared to more than four decades ago, when I wrote a three-part series in the afternoon San Jose News on homemade explosive devices. Back then, as a staff writer for the morning San Jose Mercury, I covered California radicals, left and right, and the cops trying to catch them. I even got one bomb-maker in 1972 to invite me home to see a nonworking bomb model fashioned from advice in a book we both owned, anti-war protester William Powell’s The Anarchist Cook Book.
Hobbling law enforcement, and attacking it, has long been an NRA strategy.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, federal agents had a tough time tracing the fertilizer used to make the bomb that killed 168 people and injured 680 more because the NRA had fought using identifiers for explosives.
As my then-colleague Fox Butterfield reported in The New York Times three weeks after the crime:
Technological advances in the last three decades might have made it harder to build such a bomb and easier to trace its origin, the experts say, but gun enthusiasts and makers of fertilizer and explosives have repeatedly blocked efforts to put the research to use.
“It is just amazing that in this dangerous time, fanatical, boneheaded people are opposed to controls on explosives,” said then-Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn, who introduced bills in 1993 and 1994 that would have forced manufacturers to add an identifying marker to explosives so their users could be tracked.
Mr. Schumer was referring primarily to the National Rifle Association and the explosives industry, which helped defeat the bills, citing among their objections safety hazards and reliability. The use of markers, they said, makes explosives more unstable and, when used in gunpowder, makes the charge less reliable.
Reynold Hoover, a former bomb expert with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said his agency had money in the budget in the 1970s to develop a tagging or identification agent, known as a taggant. The 3M Corporation devised the technology by the late ’70s, said Mr. Hoover, now a consultant in Washington: fluorescent particles that could be detected by ultraviolet light. Manufacturers would use a different taggant in each batch.
Although up to 90 percent of taggants might be destroyed in a detonation, enough would remain to reveal their source.
In 1979, while conducting a $5 million pilot project using taggants in some seven million pounds of explosives, the ATF was able to track down and convict James L. McFillin, who had used an explosive, Tovex 220, to make a bomb that killed one man and injured another in Baltimore.
But shortly afterward, Congress ordered the bureau to stop work on ways to trace explosives. At the time, Representative William J. Hughes, the New Jersey Democrat who headed the House subcommittee on crime, said the National Rifle Association and makers of explosives had pressured Congress to block the program.
The NRA opposed using taggants, saying they would contaminate some explosives used by gun hobbyists, like old-fashioned gunpowder called black powder and the newer smokeless powder. It said people who liked to fire antique rifles or who loaded their own ammunition would have to use less accurate gunpowder.
Let’s not forget what Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, said shortly after that terrorist act in Oklahoma City. LaPierre went on the attack against law enforcement, comparing federal agents to the Nazis and calling them “jack-booted thugs.”
Former president George H.W. Bush then resigned from the NRA in protest, but LaPierre kept his job, which speaks volumes.
As for taggants, the “study” the NRA cites to show that good science found taggants would make gunpowder less reliable and would not work was in fact only a review of the literature.
Anyone who actually reads the 1980 report, “Taggants in Explosives,” will find this revealing line by the Office of Technology Assessment: “Due to severe time constraints, OTA did little original research.”
Technology has advanced since that report, which is so old that it was prepared on a typewriter.
We can get identifiers put in gunpowders because of technological advances, just as reports get prepared these days on computers. And if “good science” says existing taggants fall short, then Congress can fund research to develop taggants that work without degrading the quality of the explosive charge in bullets.
But as the votes in the Senate killing modest gun regulation and controls on gun trafficking showed this week, what stands firmly in the way of reducing mass murders and bombings is one organization and its backers.
We can change that, once the public understands that the NRA is not so much a defender of Second Amendment rights as a lobby for enabling mass murder.
By: David Cay Johnson, The National Memo, April 20, 2013
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