“The GOP’s Violence Problem”: Accepting Of Violent Language And Violent Behavior
As The Plum Line‘s Greg Sargent rightly points out, the Republican Party has much bigger problems than inviting a washed-up whackjob like Ted Nugent to the State of the Union. Sargent says the “problem is the perpetual winking and nodding to The Crazy.”
I would take that further and say not only does the Republican leadership condone The Crazy, but also the violent tendencies associated with this type of dangerous ideology. Whether it is refusing to back the Violence Against Women Act, fighting against every single sensible gun law, promoting military force over diplomacy or failing to condemn violent rhetoric toward President Obama — the GOP is gaining a reputation of a political party that cynically accepts violent language and behavior.
Here are a few examples of why the GOP has a violence problem.
Inviting Ted Nugent To The State Of The Union
In an appallingly insensitive move, gun-crazy congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) invited right-wing rocker Ted Nugent to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, where he will be joined by more than 20 gun violence survivors to watch the president talk about his gun safety proposals.
Nugent was recently investigated by the Secret Service for threatening remarks he made towards President Obama. Nugent has referred to the president as “an evil, dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom,” going on to warn that “we need to fix this as soon as possible.” But it was his ominous warning that he “will either be dead or in jail by this time next year” if Obama won re-election that got the attention of the men in black.
The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence put out a press release Tuesday condemning the Nugent invitation. ”I can’t think of any public figure less appropriate for such an occasion,” said executive director Josh Horwitz. But where are the condemnations from the Republican leadership?
Blocking The Violence Against Women Act
House Republicans are holding up reauthorization of the traditionally bipartisan Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) because there are provisions to protect immigrants, the LGBT community, and Native Americans. Even some House GOPers sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), urging them to immediately reauthorize VAWA. Maybe someone checked the last election results that showed a majority of women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats. In fact, the 20-point gender gap was the largest in history and marked the sixth straight presidential election in which the majority of women voted Democratic.
In the video (http://youtu.be/AqoGTD1Mlw4), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) slams Senate Republicans for attempting to remove tribal provisions from the Violence Against Women Act.
Attacking Hagel For Not Being Hawkish Enough
Many Republicans prefer military action over diplomacy and are suspicious of people like Vietnam veteran and Obama defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel for saying military force should always be a last resort after exhausting every other method.
The New York Times quoted former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as saying that “this is the neocons’ worst nightmare because you’ve got a combat soldier, successful businessman and senator who actually thinks there may be other ways to resolve some questions other than force.”
Failing to Condemn Violent Rhetoric From The Right
The Republican leadership has failed to condemn the militant tendencies of the Tea Party movement and other right-wing sources. Examples include Sarah Palin’s electoral map that targeted Democratic districts (including that of Gabrielle Giffords) with crosshairs, and Florida congresswoman and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Republican opponent shooting at a human-shaped target with Wasserman Schultz’s initials on it.
But perhaps the most outrageous act was directed against Ms. Giffords in June 2010, only six months before her life was changed forever by gun violence during the Tucson mass shooting and three months after her campaign office was vandalized following the Palin crosshairs incident. Giffords’ Republican opponent Jesse Kelly held a gun-themed fundraiser at which supporters could shoot an M-16 rifle with Kelly. This is how the event was promoted: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”
Well, maybe that isn’t even the most despicable example. In 2009, Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS) told Politico that “we hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition.”
By: Josh Marks, The National Memo, February 12, 2013
“Real Guns Vs Virtual Guns”: Curious Conclusions That Overlook The Evidence
It’s been nearly two months since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., and in that time, there’s been quite a bit of debate about gun violence. Some of it, however, has led segments of the population to draw curious conclusions.
Last week, for example, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told MSNBC, “I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.” It was an odd thing for anyone, least of all a sitting senator, to say on national television.
But the sentiment, however strange, appears to reflect the opinions of Alexander’s party.
As Republican leaders insist that the debate over gun violence in America should also address the role of violent entertainment, the latest findings from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling released Thursday showed that the vast majority of GOP voters nationwide believe video games are a bigger threat than guns.
Given the choice between the two, 67 percent of Republican voters said violent video games represent a bigger threat to safety than guns. Fourteen percent said guns are the bigger safety threat.
I’ll gladly concede that societal violence is an extremely complex, multi-faceted problem, and there are cultural factors to consider.
But to think virtual guns pose a more serious threat to the public than actual guns — by a lopsided margin — is to overlook the available evidence.
To reiterate what we discussed last week, even if we put aside the irony of the underlying point — blaming simulated, pixelated guns is fine; blaming actual guns is not — these arguments aren’t new. Plenty of officials have been arguing for years that violent games desensitizes young people to violence and contributes to a larger corrosive effect on the culture.
There’s just very little evidence to support the claims. Hunches and cultural criticisms notwithstanding, social science research does not bolster the contention that gaming and gun violence are connected. (Adam Lanza was reportedly obsessed with “Dance Dance Revolution” — which is a game, as the name suggests, about moving feet, not shooting weapons.)
For that matter, the United States is not the only country with young people who play a lot of video games, but it is the only country with high rates of gun violence.
Gaming is a huge cultural phenomenon in countries like South Korea, England, Japan, and Canada — and they’re all playing many of the same games Americans enjoy — and yet, none of these countries comes close to the U.S. when it comes to deadly shootings.
And why not? Sociologists can speak to the differences in more detail, but I suspect it has something to do with access to firearms. It may seem tautological, but let’s state it for the record anyway: societies with fewer guns have less gun violence, whether they’re playing “Halo” or not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 8, 2013
“Easy Scapegoats”: Guns, Not The Mentally Ill, Kill People
After a year of violent tragedies that culminated with the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, America is finally having a conversation about gun control. For the many who want to decrease access to firearms in the wake of several mass shootings, new laws being proposed around the country to limit and regulate guns and ammunition represent a momentous first step.
But running through the gun-control debate is a more delicate conversation: how to handle mental-health treatment in America. Among both Democrats and Republicans, in both the pro-gun and anti-gun lobbies, there’s a widespread belief that mental-health treatment and monitoring is key to decreasing gun violence. Shining more light on the needs and struggles of the mentally ill would normally be a positive change; mental-health programs and services have been cut year after year in the name of austerity. But in the context of gun violence, those with mental illness have become easy scapegoats. Rather than offering solutions to the existing problems that patients and providers face, policymakers instead promise to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. The trouble is, that often means presenting policies that are actually detrimental to mental-health treatment—threatening doctor-patient confidentiality, expanding forced treatment rather than successful voluntary programs, and further stigmatizing people with databases that track who’s been committed to hospitals or mental institutions.
The National Rifle Association has led the charge to blame those with mental illness. “The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters—people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them,” NRA executive vice president Wayne Lapierre said at his December 21 press conference. “How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?” Ann Coulter was more succinct: “Guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do.”
It’s not just the NRA and the right wing who are turning mentally ill Americans into political pawns. See, for instance, New York’s new gun-control law, the first passed after Newtown. In addition to banning assault weapons and semiautomatic guns with military-level components, the legislation requires therapists, nurses and other mental-health-care providers to alert state health authorities if they deem a patient is a danger to self or others. That would then allow the state to confiscate the person’s guns. The measure broadens the confiscation powers to include those who voluntarily seek commitment to a mental-health facility—in other words, the people who get help without being forced. Finally, it strengthens Kendra’s Law, which allows the courts to involuntarily commit the mentally ill.
Other states will very likely follow suit. Legislatures in Ohio and Colorado will both consider measures to make it easier to commit people. Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley wants to broaden the range of people banned from owning guns to include those who have been civilly committed to mental institutions at any time. Policymakers in Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah have also proposed measures aimed specifically at keeping the mentally ill from getting guns.
The new rules and proposals perpetuate the assumption that people with mental illness are dangerous; instead of making people safer, the requirements may hurt efforts to get the mentally ill treatment. For instance, the expanded reporting requirements mean mental-health providers must alert officials if a patient may harm herself or others. Law-enforcement officials can then show up and confiscate any guns the patient owns. Mental-health providers are already supposed to report if a patient seems in imminent danger of doing harm, but the new law broadens that rule. It could easily chip away trust between therapists and their patients. The threat of gun confiscation may make it less likely that folks like policeman and veterans suffering from trauma to get help, since many are gun owners. “It’s very hard to get people to come forward and get help,” says Ron Honberg, the national director for policy and legal affairs at the mental-health advocacy group National Alliance on Mental Illness. “If they’re aware that by seeking help they’re going to lose their right to have a gun, we’re concerned it’s going to have a chilling effect.”
It’s also not likely to slow down the violence. Predicting murderous behavior is extremely difficult and most of the time, the providers can’t do it accurately. “We’re making an assumption that violence can be predicted,” Honberg says. In fact, it’s lack of treatment, combined with substance abuse and a history of violence, that tend to be the best predictors of future violence. Yet many of New York’s new laws—like the reporting requirements and the push to put more mentally ill people in government databases—target those who are already getting help.
The issue is not that mental-health advocates want to arm more people, but that those with mental illness are being singled out by often well-intended gun control measures, which could increase the stigma around getting help. By focusing on keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill specifically—and not those who have histories of substance abuse, domestic violence, and other predictors of violent behavior—these laws perpetuate the idea that the mentally ill are an overwhelming threat. So did a recent report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which highlighted the gaps in reporting mentally ill people to the NICS database; in red pullout text, it prominently displayed examples of mentally ill people responsible for violence.
The stereotype that the mentally ill are very violent is simply incorrect. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, people with severe mental illness, like schizophrenia, are up to three times more likely to be violent, but “most people with [severe mental illness] are not violent and most violent acts are not committed by people with [severe mental illness.]” On the whole, those with mental illness are responsible for only 5 percent of violent crimes.
“People with mental illness are so much more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators that it’s almost immeasurable,” says Debbie Plotnick, the senior director of state policy at Mental Health America, an advocacy group for mental-health treatment. According to one study, people with mental illness are 11 times more likely to be the victims of violence.
Fortunately, the national conversation hasn’t been entirely negative. Advocates see an undeniable opportunity to get more funding and attention to mental-health services. For the first time in recent memory, governors and lawmakers across the political spectrum are pushing for more dollars to help those with mental illness. That’s particularly important because over the past four years, $4.35 billion was cut in funding for Medicaid mental-health funding, substance abuse, housing, and other mental-health programs at the state and federal level. Now, even Kansas’s ultra-conservative Governor Sam Brownback is pushing for $10 million more for mental-health care. South Carolina Governor Nicki Haley, a Tea Party favorite, has also argued for an increase in funding. In Oklahoma, Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, legislatures will very likely consider investing more heavily in treatment of mental illness.
The investment is badly needed. Over the years, most states have cut back to only providing emergency and crisis care for mental illnesses. That’s both expensive and ineffective. Harvey Rosenthal, executive director of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitative Services, says the most successful programs are those that focus on getting a patient help wherever they are, while providing other necessities like housing. For instance, the “housing first” model provides housing to people who might not otherwise qualify and then layers on services like mental health and substance abuse treatment. Such programs, like New York’s Pathways to Housing, have an astounding 85 percent retention rate, and according to Rosenthal, they’re successful because they tailor to a person’s specific needs rather than telling patients “you’re mentally ill and you need medicine.”
More attention to the cracks in care for the mentally ill is a good thing. While it may not have much to do with gun violence, there is a serious mental-health-care problem in the country.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, February 7, 2013
“Gun Lobby Propaganda”: The NRA And The Myth Of The 20-Minute Police Response Time At Sandy Hook
Appearing on Fox News Sunday this week, National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre was pressed about the controversial ad the group created in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre that referenced the armed protection President Obama’s daughters receive.
Even as host Chris Wallace belittled as “ridiculous” the ad’s premise that all children deserve the same kind of protection that the president’s children have, LaPierre defended the ad and said, “Tell that to the people of Newtown.”
“So they should have Secret Service”? Wallace asked.
In response, LaPierre propagated a favorite falsehood of the pro-gun media lobby [emphasis added]:
LAPIERRE: No, but what they should have is police officers or certified armed security in those schools to keep people safe. If something happens, the police time — despite all their good intentions, is 15 to 20 minutes. It’s too long. It’s not going to help those kids.
In the wake of the Newtown shooting, LaPierre bemoaned the fact kids aren’t safe at school, in part because it takes police 15 to 20 minutes to respond to a deadly shooting like the one in Connecticut.
But that’s not true and it’s time the news media start calling out anti-gun control extremists like LaPierre and Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, among others, who keep peddling the obvious falsehood in the press.
Fact: The Newtown police station is located approximately two miles from the Sandy Hook Elementary School. There’s no way it would have taken law enforcement 20 minutes to respond to the first 911 calls reporting gunfire at the school. (Local cops could have run from the station and been at the school in less than 20 minutes.)
Fast-acting Newtown officers “made it in under three minutes, arriving in the parking lot while gunfire could still be heard,” according to New York Times interviews with the first responders that day.
But if you listen to LaPierre as well as other anti-gun control advocates who are making the media rounds, you’re led to believe gunman Adam Lanza roamed the hallways of Sandy Hook for nearly half an hour, killing people at will before law enforcement finally arrived; that terrified teachers and students were “waiting 20 minutes for the cops to show up,” as one pro-gun blogger claimed.
It’s not true. The claim is pure gun lobby propaganda.
The frightening specter of defenselessness is projected to boost the NRA’s claim that the only way to combat gun violence in school is not to control the sale and distribution of guns, but to put armed policemen in 98,000 schools in America. Other gun advocates use the phony 20-minute premise to bolster calls for allowing concealed weapons in schools.
Since the December 14 massacre, the 20-minute myth has been widely repeated among right-wing media outlets:
“It took the police 20 minutes to arrive at Sandy Hook. By the time they got there, it was over. [National Review Online]
“In the short run, stopping the next Sandy Hook means ending the deadly policy which gave the killer 20 minutes (until people with guns, the police, finally arrived) to fire 150 shots and repeatedly change magazines, murdering at leisure.” [Volokh.com]
Unfortunately, the 20-minute myth got an early boost from CNN.com, which posted an inaccurate timeline of the school massacre. CNN’s faulty claim that first responders arrived at Sandy Hook “about twenty minutes after the first” 911 calls was quickly embraced by right-wing bloggers who mocked the police’s slow response time.
But that single, erroneous report certainly can’t justify the continued misuse of the 20-minute myth, since the vast majority of Newtown reports got the facts right. Contrary to CNN timeline, it was widely reported last December that police and first responders arrived at the Newtown crime scene “instantaneously,” “within minutes” of the first 911 call, and “minutes after the assassin began his rampage.”
And two days after the shooting rampage, audio from Newtown police scanners was made public. It confirmed that officers were reporting back from the school just a few minutes after the first school calls came into the dispatcher that day.
Still, the 20-minute myth serves a political purpose, so people like factually challenged gun extremist Larry Pratt have used the concocted claim repeatedly in the media:
“The solution is for people to be able to defend themselves at the point of the crime and not wait for 20 minutes for the police come after everybody is dead.” [Dec. 18, CNN]
“And Newtown was the same, a school where nobody was able to have a gun, even if they had a concealed carry permit, which you can get in Connecticut. Nobody was able to shoot back. They had to wait some 20 minutes for the police to get there. That’s unacceptable.” [Dec. 28, Fox]
“Especially if you’re telling the potential victim you can’t be armed. You have to wait for the Cavalry to get here five, 10 or in the case of Newtown 20 minutes later. I find that unconscionable.” [Jan. 12, CNN]
“Well, the armed teacher is going to have a lot more chance stopping a mass murderer than the police who take 20 minutes to get there, as they did in Newtown, and that’s not an extraordinarily long response time.” [Jan. 17, Australia Broadcasting Corporation]
Pratt’s sinister assertion is pure fabrication. If gun advocates continue to peddle the lie, it’s up to journalists to call them on it. The falsehood purposefully hinders attempts to debate the pressing issue of gun violence, and serves an insult to the Newtown police officers on duty that dark day in December.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Huffington Post Blog, Crossed Posted at County Fair, a Media Matters For America Blog, February 5, 2013
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