“No Right Is Absolute”: Assault Weapons Are Weapons Of Mass Destruction And Should Be Banned
The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a “gun”?
I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns — hunting rifles and shotguns — for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.
But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders — except the fact that they are referred to “guns.”
Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat — and that mission alone.
No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?
Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.
Let’s be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.
When an individual is willing — or perhaps eager — to die making a big “statement” by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn’t matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.
And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns — or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives — he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.
Of course you hear people say — oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction — many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn’t easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.
More important, assault weapons have no redeeming social value or alternative use whatsoever. The only reason to purchase an assault weapon, instead of a long gun used for target practice or hunting, is to kill and maim large numbers of human beings.
And it is not the case that if assault weapons were banned ordinary people would get them anyway. We certainly don’t take that attitude with nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. We make it very hard for a terrorist to get nuclear weapons or dirty bomb. It used to be hard to get assault weapons.
When the former President of Mexico visited the United States some time ago to discuss the drug-fueled violence on the Mexican border, he pointed out that the end of the assault weapons ban in the U.S. had resulted in an explosion of smuggling of assault weapons from the United States to Mexico. Weapons that were previously unavailable in large numbers, became plentiful. He begged the United States to re-impose the assault weapons ban.
Allowing easy access to assault weapons guarantees that terrorists, criminals and mentally unstable people will use them to commit future acts of mass murder — it’s that simple. There are seven billion people on the planet. Try as we may, we are not going to prevent some of those seven billion people from becoming terrorists, criminals or mentally unstable. Why make it easy for them to do harm to their fellow human beings by giving them easy access to a weapon of mass destruction?
Since this tragedy, there have been calls for greater restrictions and background checks on those who can buy guns — and there should be. But from all accounts, the weapons used in the Connecticut murders were purchased legally by the shooter’s mother — who herself appeared to be perfectly sane right up to the moment that Lanza used those same weapons to end her life.
The NRA will no doubt repeat its mantra about the “slippery slope.” “If we ban assault weapons, shotguns will be next,” they say. Really? By banning anyone from buying Stinger Missiles that are used to shoot down airplanes do we make it more likely that the government will one day prevent people from hunting ducks?
The simple fact is that no right is absolute because rights come into conflict with each other. Your free speech does not give you the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater.
Is the NRA’s concern that banning assault weapons will put us on a “slippery slope” more important than the lives of those 20 first graders? Should it really take precedence over the fact that today in Newtown, Connecticut there are 20 families with holiday presents on a closet shelf, that were purchased for an excited six-year-old who will never open them?
Are the NRA’s fears more important than the terror faced by children in the Sandy Hook Elementary school last week?
Does the right to own an assault weapon take precedence over the right of those parents to see their children grow up, and graduate from college, and stand at the alter to be married, and have children of their own?
The bottom line is that there is no reason why weapons of mass destruction of any sort – chemical weapons, biological weapons, RPG’s, improvised explosive devices (IED’s), missiles, dirty bombs, nuclear devices, or assault weapons — should be easily accessible. For 10 years there was a ban on the production, ownership and use of assault weapons in the United States until Congress and the Bush Administration allowed it to lapse when it sunset and came up for reauthorization in 2004.
A serious response to the tragedy in Connecticut requires that Congress act to reinstate the assault weapons ban before the children of other families fall victim to the fantasies of some other mentally unbalanced individual — or the ideology of a terrorist who has been empowered by our failure to act.
By: Robert Creamer, February 18, 2013; Originally Posted in The Huffington Post Blog, December 16, 2012
“Don’t Mythologize Christopher Dorner”: The Right Sentiment, Condolences For The Victims, Condemnation Of His Actions
I am no stranger to people’s glomming on to deadly criminals and celebrating them as heroes. Bonnie and Clyde were killed just south of the town where I grew up. There was that movie made about the couple, as well as a musical and more songs that I can count. And every year the town celebrates the duo and their killing with a festival and a shootout.
Last year, one Web site promoting the festival read: “Bring your family and friends and join us each year as we remember the historical ambush of the infamous outlaws Bonnie & Clyde, with fun festivities, great food, music and authentic re-enactments.”
But as romantic as people try to make the criminal couple and the circumstances of their death, they still can’t erase the wrong the duo did.
The same is true for Christopher Dorner — the former Los Angeles police officer and fugitive accused of killing several people, including one police officer and a sheriff’s deputy — who died this week in a cabin fire while on the run.
A rambling manifesto Dorner issued had many gripes, but chief among them were that racism, abuse of power and corruption ran rampant in the Los Angeles Police Department and that he had been fired for reporting it.
Now Dorner is being compared to movie heroes, has a song written about him and has a long list of fan pages on Facebook.
But make no mistake: Christopher Dorner is no hero. Here are some of the other things in Dorner’s manifesto.
He says of his planned attacks on other officers:
“The attacks will stop when the department states the truth about my innocence, PUBLICLY!!!”
He threatened that he would “use the element of surprise where you work, live, eat and sleep,” and discover the officers’ “residences, spouses workplaces, and children’s schools.”
He continued: “To those children of the officers who are eradicated, your parent was not the individual you thought they were.”
Through his own words, Dorner forfeits any aspiration to the title of hero.
Some commentators have tried valiantly to thread an impossibly small needle in separating what Dorner did, which all people of good conscience despise, from the serious issues he raises.
Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor, said on CNN:
“This has been an important public conversation that we’ve had about police brutality, about police corruption, about state violence. I mean there were even talks about making him the first domestic drone target. This is serious business here.”
Hill continued:
“I don’t think it’s been a waste of time at all. And as far as Dorner himself goes, he’s been like a real life superhero to many people. Now don’t get me wrong. What he did was awful, killing innocent people was bad, but when you read his manifesto, when you read the message that he left, he wasn’t entirely crazy. He had a plan and a mission here. And many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people. They are rooting for somebody who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching ‘Django Unchained’ in real life. It’s kind of exciting.”
I agree that the issues of police brutality and corruption should now and always be part of the conversation, particularly when discussing police departments with a bad history when it comes to minority and other vulnerable communities.
But I do not see a need to explain why people — particularly many on social media — are mythologizing Dorner. Rooting for a suspected killer who makes threats against even more innocent people and their families is just horrendous. It’s not exciting; it’s revolting.
Hill later apologized for his choice of words. I applaud him for doing that.
Still, too many people online have portrayed Dorner’s actions as righteous retribution. But nothing can change the fact that those actions are wrong.
Fighting for justice is noble. Spilling innocent blood is the ultimate act of cowardice. Dorner is not the right emblem for those wronged by the system.
This is not a game or a movie. This is about real people who lead real lives and their real families who dug real graves. Let’s give everyone involved time to mourn. Let’s have the respect to not honor the person believed to be responsible for the mourning.
According to KTLA in Los Angeles, Dorner’s mother issued a statement that read in part: “It is with great sadness and heavy hearts that we express our deepest sympathies and condolences to anyone that suffered losses or injuries resulting from Christopher’s actions.” They said it continued: “We do not condone Christopher’s actions.”
That’s the right sentiment: condolences for the victims and condemnation of Dorner’s actions. Period.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 15, 2013
“Memory And Respect”: Sandy Hook, The Green Ribbon, And NRA Bullying
If a viewer wanted to tell who was a Democrat and who was a Republican at the State of the Union address, there was no need to match faces to facebooks or even to see where they sat in the House chamber. All that was necessary was to look for the green ribbon.
Democrats (and some guests) sported bright green ribbons on their lapels, symbolizing support for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School gun massacre. Republicans were largely ribbon-free. You can see the loop of green on the suit of Vice President Biden in photos of him standing behind President Obama at the speech. House Speaker John Boehner’s lapel is bare. It was like a live-action version of the Dr. Seuss tale about the Star-bellied Sneetches and the Plain-bellied Sneetches. But instead of being a thinly-veiled lesson on race relations, as the children’s book is, the ribbon divide displayed a force nearly as powerful in American politics: the National Rifle Association.
Now, in the plain-lapelled members’ defense, there is something a little irritating about the whole ribbon thing. There’s a ribbon for everything (if there isn’t a rubber bracelet), and not everyone wants or needs to wear a spot of color to express concern for an issue or disease. How many of us sided with Seinfeld‘s Kramer when he refused to wear the AIDS ribbon (even as he attempted to do the AIDS walk)? The social pressure to show solidarity by accessories can be a tad too much.
But congressmen and congressional politics are all about symbols. So why couldn’t the entire House and Senate just wear the damn ribbon? Sadly, the ribbon came to mean something more political than it was meant to be. It was supposed to be a symbol of memory and respect for the children gunned down in their elementary school. Instead, it became a symbol of being for gun control. And while there are indeed members who sincerely oppose any kind of gun control on Second Amendment grounds, there are others who are simply too afraid of the NRA’s power to take a stand—even a mild one—for even the tamest of gun safety proposals. Someone can be a strong Second Amendment supporter and still have compassion for the families of the Sandy Hook victims. The NRA shouldn’t frighten lawmakers from showing basic respect for innocent victims of violence.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, February 14, 2013
“Wayne LaPierre Is Very Afraid”: A Worldview Of Nightmares, Fears And Paralyzing Paranoia
It must be terrifying to be Wayne LaPierre, the man who has led the NRA for the past two decades. For years he has shared his nightmares and fears of daily living with us — a worldview of paralyzing paranoia, where terrorists, bad weather and Latin American gangsters lurk behind every corner, ready to prey on unarmed citizens.
“Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States. Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world,” he explains in his latest expression of anguish, an Op-Ed published in the Daily Caller yesterday. “And though the states on the U.S./Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last.”
“Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals,” he continues. “These are perils we are sure to face — not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.”
While the world has always been an impossibly forbidding place, LaPierre continues, our socialist president has made it worse, naturally: “When the next terrorist attack comes, the Obama administration won’t accept responsibility. Instead, it will do what it does every time: blame a scapegoat and count on Obama’s ‘mainstream’ media enablers to go along.”
And finally, the solution: “No wonder Americans are buying guns in record numbers right now, while they still can and before their choice about which firearm is right for their family is taken away forever.”
(What LaPierre should really be worried about is a faulty “shift” button on his keyboard, as he inexplicably failed to capitalize the name of his organization here: “Now, an even stronger nra is the only chance gun owners have to withstand the coming siege.”)
This frightful fretting is nothing new for LaPierre.
When the NRA head appeared on Fox News Sunday earlier this month, he told host Chris Wallace, “My gosh, in the shadow of where we are sitting now, gangs are out there in Washington, D.C. You can buy drugs. You can buy guns. They are trafficking in 13-year-old girls. And our government is letting them!”
At his much-lampooned press conference after the Newtown massacre he said, “The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them. They walk among us every single day, and does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school, he’s already identified at this very moment?”
This is bread and butter LaPierre, seeded in the paranoid high crime days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when politicians feared the rise of a generation of crack-addicted “superpredators” and when anyone aspiring to have a voice in the national public policy debate had to be “tough on crime.”
And if it wasn’t criminals, it was government you should fear, LaPierre has repeatedly warned over the past 25 years. Three months after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when more than 160 federal employees were murdered, LaPierre went on “Meet the Press” and warned that federal law enforcement agents, in “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms,” were out to “attack law-abiding citizens.”
That prompted former President George H.W. Bush to publicly revoke his lifetime membership to the NRA in a sharply worded letter published in the New York Times.
Eventually, everyone else moved past the heady ’90s paranoia of inner-city crime and black helicopters — LaPierre did not.
Violent crime is now at a two-decade low and urban centers are seeing a revival unlike any time in the past 100 years. But LaPierre chooses to ignore that. And he chooses to ignore the fact that most gun violence is suicide, while most homicide is inflicted by people who know each other (usually scorned lovers, angry relatives and criminals in dispute) — hardened criminals preying on innocents is relatively rare.
For instance, in his Daily Caller Op-Ed, LaPierre writes hyperbolically: “After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.”
In fact, crime dropped in New York City during Hurricane Sandy, with murders plummeting a whopping 86 percent over the same period in 2011 and overall crime down 27 percent. There was a single homicide on the Monday before the storm hit, then none for the next five days.
“After a natural disaster or large-scale catastrophe like 9/11, we see conventional crime come down,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne explained. “A lot of people are indoors. Taverns are closed. You have less people out late at night and getting into disputes.”
While conditions after storm were hellish in places, there were also plenty of beautiful stories of cooperation and altruism and small acts of random kindness: Sandwich shop owners staying open 24 hours a day to serve people with no food, some giving it away for free; a hotel manager turning away marathoners to give shelter to victims; people running extension cords out their window so strangers could charge their cellphones for free; a doctor giving free healthcare to victims, etc.
LaPierre chooses to ignore all of this and see the world as nothing but a cold and scary place where you can’t trust anyone and only lethal force can protect you. Too bad for him.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 14, 2013
“We Deserve A Vote”: Americans Stand With President Obama’s Gun Control Pleas
On Tuesday, President Obama delivered his fourth State of the Union address (his 2009 speech was technically not a State of the Union). He followed the traditional path of laying out his vision with a laundry list of policy ideas and priorities. As he suggested, all are needed to create more jobs, encourage more economic growth, and to keep America safe, while protecting its values of fairness and equal opportunity.
It was not until he called upon Congress to take up new proposals to curb gun violence that he became emotional and animated. It was a stark contrast to his address in 2009, delivered shortly after the tragedy in Tuscon, Ariz., when he failed to mention any need for gun control at all.
Recent Quinnipiac University polling shows the majority of Americans are more supportive of a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons (56 percent to 39 percent) and more supportive of a nationwide ban on the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines (56 percent to 40 percent) than members of Congress, and overwhelmingly support the president’s position to require background checks for all gun buyers (92 percent to 7 percent).
In having the confidence of knowing where the American people stand and with Gabby Giffords in the audience, along with many other victims of gun violence, the president said, “This time is different.” In a cadence often reserved for the pulpit, he called out the names of those individuals and communities who have suffered tragic losses and repeated the simple refrain, “They deserve a vote.”
It was a powerful moment in the speech, one that brought scores of lawmakers to their feet in thunderous applause, and one that the president can now use effectively to continue to build the necessary political support to pass common sense gun control measures.
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, Debate Club, February 13, 2013
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