“Levitating With Paranoia”: The NRA’s Task Is To Frighten People And Sell More Guns
The National Rifle Association wants to give me a “heavy-duty” duffel bag.
It’s a nice one, too — roomy enough for an AR-15 and maybe a half-dozen 30-round clips. Stitched on the side is a bold-looking NRA patch.
The bag is mine if I pay $25 and join up.
Like most gun owners in this country, I’m not an NRA member. It’s possible that Wayne LaPierre got my name off a mailing list from catalogs that sell hunting gear.
LaPierre is the NRA’s perpetually apoplectic “executive vice president.” You see him on TV preaching against gun control, practically levitating with paranoia. He signed the letter that arrived with the nifty duffel bag offer.
One thing about Wayne, he likes to underline. He’s also fond of boldface type, and of capitalizing important words. This rises to a fever pitch when he’s writing about “anti-gun members of Congress”:
And they will not stop until they BAN hundreds of commonly owned firearms, PROHIBIT private transfers of firearms, CLOSE gun shops and shows, and DESTROY your freedom to defend yourself, your home and your loved ones.
Here’s another beauty:
Remember, gun ban politicians and their media allies are on the attack. And the future of your freedom is at stake.
LaPierre might seem like an under-medicated wackjob, but he’s just acting. His job is to frighten people, and to sell more guns.
Major firearms manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson and Beretta have given millions of dollars to the NRA. Sturm, Ruger donated a dollar from every gun sale to the organization from May 2011 to May 2012, raising $1.25 million.
This isn’t mentioned in Wayne’s letter. He calls the NRA a “grassroots membership organization,” when in reality it’s a coldhearted lobby for the gun industry.
And the industry definitely gets its money’s worth. The push in Congress to revive the ban on assault rifles is dead and other modest reforms are in trouble, in spite of the nation’s horror at the massacres in Aurora, CO, and Newtown, CT.
The NRA scares politicians far more than it scares the average citizen. The senators who are now wimping out on broader background checks for gun buyers aren’t afraid for our Second Amendment rights; they’re afraid the NRA will bankroll their opponents in the next election.
Republicans cower most reliably, but spineless Democrats are in no short supply. A push to federally limit the capacity of ammo magazines to a mere 10 bullets is foundering strictly because the NRA opposes it.
Hunters and sport shooters don’t need 30 rounds to hit what they’re aiming at, but mass murderers, gang bangers and cop killers love those big macho clips.
Buying bullets online is another convenience that the NRA is fighting to preserve. It’s how a disturbed University of Central Florida student, James Seevakumaran, compiled the arsenal that he intended to use against fellow dorm residents last month. (He killed himself during preparations, after his roommate called the police.)
The NRA wasn’t always quite so loony. It once supported comprehensive background checks on gun purchases, and even took a position against guns being carried in public schools.
Now the group has swung 180 degrees, in sneering opposition to public sentiment. Polls show 90 percent of American favor background checks on all firearms sales, including those at local gun shows, which are currently unregulated.
LaPierre insists that background checks will lead to a “national gun registry,” which will then lead to mass confiscation of firearms by the government.
Oh, sure. The same government that can’t afford to deliver mail on Saturdays is poised to send armed agents to every single house in the country to search for weapons.
The notion is ridiculous, and Wayne’s well aware of it. The NRA isn’t aiming for the mainstream support. The fringe is what they’re after — the spooked-out guys who were lining up to buy assault rifles after the mass shooting in Newtown.
By the way, those 20 murdered children and six murdered adults aren’t mentioned anywhere in LaPierre’s rousing membership letter. I double-checked all the underlined sentences and boldfaced paragraphs.
Not a single word, capitalized or otherwise, about how some crackpot with a Bushmaster fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, turning a schoolhouse into a slaughterhouse.
His name was Adam Lanza, and he already owned a duffel bag. Investigators who opened it found 50 .22-caliber bullets, ear protection, binoculars, paper targets and two NRA certificates, one each for the killer and his mother.
The organization says they were not card-carrying members. Lanza shot his mom before he drove to Sandy Hook Elementary.
His duffel bag didn’t have an NRA logo, but maybe next time.
There’s always a next time.
By: Carl Hiaasen, The National Memo, April 9, 2013
“The Cultural Fight For Guns”: Understanding Does Not Entail Acceptance
One of the oddities of the gun-control debate—apart from ours being the only country that really has one—is that the gun side basically gave up on serious arguments about safety or self-defense or anything else a while ago. The old claims about the million—or was it two million? It kept changing—bad guys stopped by guns each year has faded under the light of scrutiny. Indeed, people who possess guns are almost five times more likely to be shot than those who don’t. (“A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons,” the authors of one study point out, to help explain that truth.) Far from providing greater safety, gun possession greatly increases the risk of getting shot—and, as has long been known, keeping a gun in the house chiefly endangers the people who live there.
And so the new arguments for keeping as many guns as possible in the hands of as many people as possible tend to be more broadly fatalistic, and sometimes sniffily “cultural.” Ours is a gun-ridden country and a gun-filled culture, the case goes, and to try and change that is not just futile but, in a certain sense, disrespectful, even ill-mannered. It’s not just that Mayor Bloomberg’s indignation is potentially counter-productive—basically, his critics suggest, if not so bluntly, because a rich, short Jew from New York is not a persuasive advocate against guns. It’s that Mayor Bloomberg just doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand the central role that guns play in large parts of non-metropolitan American culture. What looks to his admirers like courage his detractors dismiss as snobbishness.
And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don’t quite work, because the “smokers” in this case feel something less tangible and yet more valued than their own health is at stake. As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.”
It’s true. Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen. Middle-aged stockbrokers in New York collect Stratocasters and Telecasters they’ll never play; Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld own more cars than they can drive. Wine cellars fill up with wine that will never be drunk. The propaganda for guns and the identification of gun violence with masculinity is so overpoweringly strong in our culture that it is indeed hard to ask those who already feel disempowered to resist their allure. If we asked all those middle-aged bankers to put away their Strats—an activity that their next-door neighbors would bless—they would be indignant. It’s not about music; it’s about me, they would say, and my right to own a thing that makes me happy. And so with guns. Dan Baum, for instance, has an interesting new book out, “Gun Guys: A Road Trip.” His subjects, those gun guys, are portrayed sympathetically—they are sympathetic—and one gets their indignation at what they see as their “warrior ethic” being treated with contempt by non-gun guys. (That’s, at least, how they experience it, though where it matters, in Congressional votes, there is little but deference.) As Baum points out, gun laws are loose in America because that’s the way most Americans want it, or them.
But though you’ve got to empathize before you can understand, understanding doesn’t entail acceptance. Slavery, polygamy, female circumcision—all these things played a vital role at one time or another in somebody’s sense of the full expression of who they are. We struggle to understand our own behavior in order to alter it: everything evil that has ever been done on earth was once a precious part of somebody’s culture, including our own.
We should indeed be as tolerant as humanly possible about other people’s pleasures, even when they’re opaque to us, and try only to hive off the bad consequences from the good. The trouble is that assault weapons have no good consequences in civilian life. A machine whose distinguishing characteristic is that it can put a hundred and sixty-five lethal projectiles into the air in a few moments has no real use except to kill many living things very quickly. We cannot limit its bad uses while allowing its beneficial ones, because it has no beneficial ones. If the only beneficial ones are the feeling of power they provide, then that’s not good enough—not for the rest of us to be obliged to tolerate their capacity to damage and kill. (And as to the theoretical tyrannies that they protect us from: well, if our democratic government and its military did turn on us, that would surely present a threat and a problem that no number of North Dakotans with their Bushmasters could solve.)
In a practical sense, we’ve been reduced to arguing about marginal measures—a universal background check, which might still become law; an assault-weapons ban, which seems to have been put aside. There is, let it be said, another cultural argument to be made here about both. Though gun violence remains shockingly common in America, gun massacres, of the kind that took place in Newtown or, before, in Aurora (remember that? A while ago now, though this week the shooter appeared in court) and that are dependent, in some ways, on the speed and scope of assault weapons, are still statistically rare. If one is playing the odds, there really isn’t any reason to be frightened for your children each time you drop them off at first grade, though parents feel that fear anyway. They might have more to worry about from the gun in the closet, or the person who will still be able to get a gun legally. That’s true about lots of things. It’s even truer about terrorism, for instance. Yet, rather obviously, we spend a lot of money, and go through many airport contortions, to protect ourselves from what is, rationally considered, a minute threat.
That we do so is not unreasonable. Though, from a cold-blooded accounting point of view, we might be able to survive many more 9/11s, the shiver that one feels writing that sentence reveals its falseness. The nation might survive it, but we would not, in the sense that our belief in ourselves, our feeling for our country, our core sense of optimism about the future, would collapse with repeated terrorist attacks. And so it is with gun massacres, whether in Aurora or Newtown or the next place. Our sense of what is an acceptable and unacceptable risk for any citizen, let alone child, to endure, our sense of possible futures to consider—above all, our sense, to borrow a phrase from the President, of who we are, what we stand for, the picture of our civilization we want to look at ourselves and present to the world—all of that is very much at stake even if the odds of any given child being killed are, blessedly, small. Laws should be designed to stop likely evils; it’s true, not every possible evil. But some possible evils are evil enough to call for laws just by their demonstrated possibility. There are a few things a society just can’t bear, and watching its own kids killed in the classroom, even every once in a while, is one of them.
By: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, April 4, 2013
“The World Today”: Martin Luther King And Today’s Gun Advocates
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated 45 years ago yesterday, and one of the interesting little sidelights to the debate over guns that you might not be aware of is that gun advocates claim King as one of their own. You see, King had armed guards protect his family, and at one point applied for a permit in Alabama to carry a concealed weapon himself. He was turned down, since in the Jim Crow days the state of Alabama wasn’t about to let black men carry guns.
You can find references to these facts on all kinds of pro-gun web sites, as nonsensical as it may seem. Gun advocates want to claim King as part of their cause, but also want to completely repudiate everything he believed about the power of nonviolence, which is kind of like Exxon saying John Muir would have favored drilling for oil in Yosemite because he sometimes rode in cars. The reason Martin Luther King sought armed protection was there were significant numbers of people who wanted to kill him, and eventually one of them succeeded. If you’re a target for assassination, you should go ahead and buy a gun. But most of us aren’t.
This gets back to the threatening world so many gun advocates believe they live in. As they tell it, every one of us needs an arsenal of handguns and shotguns and AR-15s, despite the risk they might pose to ourselves and our families, because the risk from outside is so much greater. The imagine themselves as vulnerable as a civil rights activist in the Deep South in 1968. And they also believe that the authorities that are charged with our protection are indifferent or even hostile to our safety. That was certainly the case with King and other civil rights activists in the South in the 1960s; they knew that the government and the police wouldn’t be there to protect them, and some might even participate in trying to harm them.
But guess what: that’s not the world we live in today. The idea that the government is going to come knocking down your door, and you need to be ready to engage in a firefight with the police when that happens, is as ludicrous as the idea that MLK would be an advocate for further proliferation of guns if he were alive today.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 5, 2013
“Time To Hunt Democrats”: Gun Rights Activists Must Stop Threatening Rhetoric
This will be short.
So, being the liberal I am I was listening to NPR yesterday just after I debated my weekly sparing partner, Republican Jim Innocenzi, on WTTG-TV here in DC. We went at it on guns. The story on NPR was about the president’s trip to Colorado to highlight his effort on universal background checks and to focus on that state’s passage of legislation to control guns.
Here is what I heard, verbatim, from Dudley Brown, head of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners in Colorado and the NPR announcer:
“This is a very Western state with traditional Western values,” he says. “And citizens had to have firearms for self-defense, and right now that’s still the case.”
…He’s promising political payback in next year’s election that could cost Colorado Democrats their majorities.
“I liken it to the proverbial hunting season,” Brown says. “We tell gun owners, ‘There’s a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.'”
Really? After the murders in Kaufman County, Texas and West Virginia of prosecutors and police, he really wants to talk about hunting Democrats, like deer? Is he trying to channel Sarah Palin? Wayne LaPierre, too, I guess. Can we just stop talk of bulls eyes and hunting public officials.
Come on. No one is taking away the 320 million guns in America; no one is stopping the $12 billion the gun industry makes a year; no one is preventing hunting; no one is taking away your constitutional rights.
Sadly, Dudley Brown and the NRA’s answer to gun violence is more guns. What a shame.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, April 4, 2013
“Like Sands Through The Hourglass”: The Original GOP Gun Flip-Flop
If you’ve been following the gun control debate, you probably know that universal background checks are on life support after Republicans lawmakers flip-flopped on their support for closing the private seller loophole. You may also know that the National Rifle Association itself once supported universal background checks, even though it’s leading the charge against them now.
But would Republicans really kill a bid to expand background checks, even though they supported them so recently and despite polls showing nine in 10 American favor an expansion?
We don’t have to wonder because they already did, back in 1999 after the Columbine shooting. Thirty-one Senate Republicans — including current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — joined with Democrats to close the gun show loophole, only to have their colleagues in the House kill it. The saga has largely escaped notice so far this year, but offers some important lessons for those who favor gun control today.
By 1999, pro-gun control forces hadn’t seen progress since Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress five years earlier. But after the Columbine school shooting in late April, public opinion shifted dramatically and President Clinton pushed to close the so-called gun show loophole and pass a host of other gun control measures.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 89 percent of Americans favored background checks for people buying guns at gun shows — almost identical to polls today.
In fact, when Senate Republicans narrowly defeated a Democratic measure to close the gun show loophole on May 12 of that year, the public outcry was so intense that the GOPers reversed course within less than 24 hours. “As outraged constituents lit up phone lines on Capitol Hill to protest the earlier vote and the Clinton administration launched a barrage of criticism, Senate leaders huddled with National Rifle Association lobbyists and GOP strategists to undo what several Republicans feared could arouse voter reprisals in next year’s elections,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time.
Sen. John McCain joined with Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and Sen. Larry Craig, an NRA board member, to come up with their own proposal. The GOP bill required anyone attending a gun show with the intent of selling a firearm to get a background check on purchasers, but gave law enforcement only 24 hours to review the check, instead of the typical three days, and didn’t cover flea markets or pawn shops. It passed by a single vote, largely along party lines.
“There was a realization that there was a loophole that had to be closed,” McCain said. (A year later, McCain would go on to cut an ad endorsing two state measures to enact universal background checks, as Greg Sargent reported yesterday.)
But Democrats weren’t satisfied and demanded more. Clinton said the GOP bill was “riddled with high-caliber loopholes” and Republicans caved — they dismissed their own bill and took up the Democratic proposal once again. “They’re getting the shit kicked out of them in the media and they know it; they’re in complete disarray. Basically, the country is seeing just how beholden the Republican caucus is to the NRA,” an unnamed Democratic staffer told Jake Tapper, then at Salon.
Just two weeks later, victory came when Vice President Al Gore cast the deciding vote to approve the Democratic amendment, which was attached to a larger juvenile justice bill introduced by New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, one of Congress’ most outspoken proponents of gun control.
Six moderate GOPers voted for the amendment to close the loophole. But a whopping 31 Senate Republicans voted for final passage of the larger bill, including the Democratic provision to mandate background checks at gun shows, giving it a huge 73-25 majority. McConnell voted in favor, as did Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions, two of the most powerful Republicans in the upper chamber today, along with conservative stalwarts like Rick Santorum, Strom Thurmond and Jon Kyl.
“This is a turning point for our country,” Gore proclaimed. But the victory was short-lived.
In June, the Republican-controlled House passed a bill with a much weaker background check provision, and rejected the Senate version. Then nothing happened. Usually, the Senate and House would each appoint representatives to hash out the differences between their two bills. But instead, House Republicans simply refused to appoint negotiators for months, sapping momentum from the bill.
By the time the first anniversary of the Columbine shooting rolled around in April of 2000, there had still been no forward motion.
Activists kept up the pressure for months, as did Clinton, but the public had grown weary and lawmakers no longer faced the constituent pressure of the previous year. ”Despite a series of tragic shootings in our nation’s schools, places of worship, day care centers, and workplaces Congress has stalled passage of common-sense gun safety legislation that passed in the Senate for over one year,” Clinton said in November of 2000, 18 months after the Senate passed a bill with a large bipartisan majority to close the loophole. But by then, the election had sealed the fate of the Democratic bill and universal background checks, at least until 2013.
The saga provides two big lessons. First, it shows that advocates must move quickly in order to capitalize on the public outcry following a mass a shooting like the one at Columbine. Already, three and half months after Sandy Hook, momentum seems to be flagging as Republicans walk away from one commitment after another. It may be too late, but if it’s not, Democrats need to move quickly while they can.
And second, it shows that those opposed to reform are not above using every procedural hurdle at their disposal to thwart reform, even when the vast majority of Americans support change and when their own party has voted for it just months earlier. In 1999, the public opinion landscape was even more favorable than it is today, but a minority of Republicans in leadership were able to kill it. More important, they weren’t punished for it in the next election. If you were a Republican lawmaker today, the experience of 14 years ago might convince you to obstruct, hunker down and hope the issue just goes away.
UPDATE: In 2001, the NRA’s official magazine wrote a lengthy article attacking John McCain, calling him “one of the premier flag carriers for the enemies of the Second Amendment.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, April 4, 2013
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