“Reasonable Expectations”: Why The NRA’s Best Argument Is Still Bunk
Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association was back in the spotlight on Wednesday—this time to appear before a congressional committee contemplating new gun violence legislation. And while LaPierre got emotional at a few points, he spent most of his testimony trying to make a pragmatic argument: “We need to be honest about what works and what does not work,” LaPierre said, in a prepared statement. “Proposals that would only serve to burden the law-abiding have failed in the past and will fail in the future.”
LaPierre didn’t specify which past laws he had in mind, but it’s a safe bet that he was thinking about two high-profile pieces of legislation from the early 1990s. One was the Brady Law, which created a system of background checks for people purchasing guns. The other was the 1994 crime bill, which included a ban on some assault weapons. LaPierre is hardly the only person who thinks those laws demonstrate the futility of gun control. Most experts agree that the cumulative effect of the laws was, at best, modest.1
It’s one thing to say gun laws haven’t significantly reduced gun violence, but quite another to say they couldn’t.
But it’s one thing to say gun laws haven’t significantly reduced gun violence, quite another to say they couldn’t. Both the Brady Law and assault weapons ban had serious, specific flaws. The most conspicuous problem with the Brady Law was that it didn’t affect private sales: You could buy a gun from a non-licensed dealer—say, at a gun show—without anybody checking to make sure you didn’t have a criminal record or some other characteristic that made it illegal for you to have a weapon. The big loophole in the assault rifle ban was that its definition of prohibited weapons, which manufacturers were able to circumvent by making minor modifications to existing guns. But gun control advocates have learned a lot since that time. And that’s one reason to think the proposals now on the table could have a bigger impact than their predecessors did.
To be fair, it’s not as if architects of the Brady Law or assault weapons ban thought either law would have a huge impact on crime. It’s easy to forget now, but enactment of the Brady Law culminated a decade of political struggle against the opponents of gun control, particularly the National Rifle Association. It took the election of Bill Clinton, who had promised to sign such a bill as president, to break the logjam—and even then it was a struggle. “I remember going up to the final day of that vote, we were whipping it for over a month,” says Jim Kessler, who was an aide to then-Congressman Charles Schumer, one of the law’s co-sponsors, and is now senior vice president for policy at Third Way. “We did not have the support of the speaker, we did not have the judiciary chairman, Jack Brooks of Texas, we had to do it on our own—and up to the day of the vote, we felt we might not have the votes to pass.” Given that political reality, the advocates of gun laws knew they would be settling for highly imperfect legislation. One hope was that passing Brady would demonstrate the political viability of gun legislation, making it possible to pass stronger legislation later on. “The NRA had such a stranglehold around the neck of Congress, we knew that if we were going to get anything through, it had to be narrow,” says Richard Aborn, a former prosecutor who was president of the Brady Campaign during the early 1990s.
But advocates of gun legislation in the 1990s didn’t simply lack sufficient political power. They also lacked know-how. At the time, experts didn’t really understand gun shows—and they certainly didn’t grasp the role that gun shows might play in facilitating sales once the Brady Law was in effect. “The notion of private sales and, in particular, gun show leakage was not on ours, or anybody else’s, radar screen,” Aborn says. And even if lawmakers had been thinking about gun shows, it’s not clear how much they could have done to restrict sales, at least in that political environment: Requiring private dealers to run full background checks, cross-checking identifications with criminal records and such, would have been time-consuming and in some cases unwieldy. Tom Diaz, a former Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee and former policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, explains, “There was no established system to do the background check. It seems easy now, but in the mid-1990s there were no ‘apps’ and the communication among computers was fragile. It was just much easier and more realistic to require federal firearms licensees—i.e., dealers—to do the background check, since they were already regulated under existing law.”
Veterans of the assault weapons ban fight recall facing similar obstacles. Lack of technology wasn’t an issue, but lack of understanding about guns was. Diaz, author of a forthcoming book called The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It, remembers the crafting of that bill as a decidedly amateur exercise:
In the case of the assault weapons ban, it was as inelegant as this: a bunch of politicians (mostly in the Senate, then in the House as the Senate bill became the vehicle) who knew (and some still know) precious little or even nothing at all about guns in general and assault weapons in particular literally sewed together (1) a list of guns, like Uzis and AKs, and (2) a silly list of “features” (bells and whistles) that “defined” in law what an assault weapon was supposed to be. If the gun had two or more of these features, well, it was an assault weapon. The defect was that manufacturers easily just eliminated the bells and whistles, but kept the major design features that make assault weapons so problematic, namely the ability to accept a high-capacity magazine, and a pistol grip to hold the gun for rapid fire.
One sign that the advocates of new gun laws have learned from the past is that their proposals are more sophisticated, and savvy, than the ones they put forward last time.2 Under the assault weapons proposals circulating now, including the proposal from California Senator Diane Feinstein, a gun would be illegal if it had just one criteria of an automatic rifle, rather than two. Lawmakers are also talking about new restrictions on high-capacity magazines. Christopher Koper, a criminologist at George Mason who was co-author of the official Justice Department review of the old assault weapons ban, thinks a stronger law has potential. “Restrictions like the old ones on assault weapons and large capacity magazines probably won’t lower the overall rate of gun crime,” he says, “but they may modestly reduce shootings by reducing gun attacks with particularly high numbers of shots fired. My best estimate is that the impact on shootings would be under 5 percent overall. I wouldn’t consider this trivial, however, given the seriousness and social costs of shootings.”
More important, advocates for gun laws have quietly shifted their priorities. The assault weapons ban continues to get the most publicity, but the real focus—for advocates and the lawmakers they support—is on a better system of background checks. “Universal background checks… would have much greater impacts,” Koper says. “That could be a game-changer, but they also need to make sure the law is accompanied by meaningful penalties and enforcement.” The advocates for new gun laws seem to grasp that last point. And that includes the president. Obama has already ordered law enforcement agencies to trace the history of guns they seize in crimes. It was one of the executive orders he issued when he unveiled his full gun plan.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the new push for gun legislation is destined to succeed—or to have dramatic effects on crime. Lawmakers in more conservative and rural districts remain reluctant to take on the National Rifle Association and its allies. And even the new laws will have loopholes. The more government regulates gun purchases from legal dealers, for example, the more criminals will seek to get them illegally. And the more government limits the manufacturer certain types of weapons, the more criminals will use older, grandfathered versions—or get them from overseas.
But even a modest impact on violence would represent progress. It would create a framework on which future lawmakers can build stronger regulations and, in the meantime, it would save at least a few lives. “Just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can,” says Aborn. “Will it stop all gun crime? No. But … we don’t say repeal the murder statutes because it doesn’t stop all murders. There have to be reasonable expectations and a reasonable expectation is that it will make a difference and save some lives.”
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, January 31, 2013
“Madman”: NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Is The Best Witness For Gun Control
Democrats and Republicans may never come to an agreement on issues like gun control and health insurance coverage of birth control, but Democrats did show they are ahead in one department: how to hold a hearing.
When the Obama administration announced it would require insurers to cover birth control—a basic health cost for many women, and much cheaper than dealing with an unwanted pregnancy—conservatives went batty. They said it was religious persecution to require religion-based schools and hospitals to adhere to the rule, since the host institutions oppose birth control. Mind you, the institutions don’t oppose the federal student aid, Medicare, and Medicaid that ends up supporting their universities and hospitals. But they didn’t think they should have to play by the government’s rules on health.
House Republicans held a hearing on the issue, and invited no women to testify. The glaring omission not only detracted from the credibility of the hearings, but ended up buttressing the other side’s case. Georgetown University Law School student Sandra Fluke complained, and ended up becoming a media star. Rush Limbaugh’s description of her as a “slut” and prostitute merely brought fence-sitters over to Fluke’s side.
Democrats made no such mistake when they held hearings on gun violence Wednesday. They invited the very vocal, unapologetically anti-any-kind-of-gun-restriction executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, to testify. They invited a woman who opposes gun control and who described it as something of a feminist issue. They also invited powerful witnesses in favor of gun restrictions and background checks, and their testimony (especially that of former representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, who talked emotionally about the day Giffords was shot in the head by a deranged gunman). Had the committee followed the path of the House panel on contraception, it would have limited its witness list to pro-gun-control voices alone. Their statements might have been moving, but alone—without the controverting comments of LaPierre and others—they would have seemed more manipulative.
Further, LaPierre’s absolutist stance on any kind of restrictions or background checks ended up helping the progun control side. He may well have ginned up his base and fundraising (which may well have been the point), but he did not appear to the general public as someone interested in pursuing a reasonable accord. He had his say, and had his day in the court of public opinion. And that ended up creating a more powerful case for the committee Democrats than if they had held a show trial.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2013
“Straight From Central Casting”: Wayne LaPierre Tries To Manhandle Facts And Logic
Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s chief executive, arrived for his hearing on Capitol Hill in the organization’s trademark fashion: violently.
When he and his colleagues stepped off the elevator in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday morning and found TV cameras waiting in the hallway, LaPierre’s bodyguards swung into action. One of them, in blatant violation of congressional rules, bumped and body-checked journalists out of the way so they couldn’t film LaPierre or question him as he walked.
“You don’t have jurisdiction here!” a cameraman protested as an NRA goon pushed him against a wall. After the melee, congressional officials informed the NRA officials that, in the halls of Congress, they had to follow congressional procedures — which prohibit manhandling.
This must have come as a surprise to the gun lobbyists, whose swagger seems to suggest that they are, in fact, in control of Congress. In their world, nothing trumps the Second Amendment — not even the First Amendment.
From beginning to end, LaPierre’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a study in vainglory. The written testimony he submitted to Congress came with a biography describing him as a “Renaissance man,” a “skilled hunter,” and an “acclaimed speaker and political force of nature” as he preserved freedom. “There has been no better leader of this great cause than Wayne LaPierre!” the bio boasted.
After his decades with the group, LaPierre is the public face of the NRA, and the man gun-control advocates most love to hate. His unsmiling manner, his snarling statements and even his memorable name are from villainy central casting. “Mr. LaPierre, it’s good to see you again,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said from the dais, recalling bygone fights with her nemesis. “We tangled — what was it? — 18 years ago. You look pretty good, actually.”
Usually, LaPierre comes out the victor in these tangles, and on Wednesday he was so confident of another win that he boldly declared that the NRA would oppose the most innocuous of proposals to reduce gun violence: criminal background checks.
Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) reminded LaPierre that the NRA once supported checks with “no loopholes anywhere, for anyone.” So does the NRA favor closing the “gun-show loophole” that allows people to avoid background checks?
“We do not,” LaPierre replied.
His reasoning, as always, is that existing gun laws aren’t being enforced — but he seems to have pulled the evidence out of his gun barrel. “Out of more than 76,000 firearms purchases supposedly denied by the federal instant check system, only 62 were referred for prosecution,” LaPierre declared in his opening statement.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) looked up the actual statistic. “In 2012 more than 11,700 defendants were charged with federal gun crimes,” Whitehouse said, “a lot more than 62.”
LaPierre had been caught. “So those — the 62, Senator, statistic, was for Chicago alone,” he clarified, a salient fact omitted from his original testimony.
His logic failed him as badly as his facts. “My problem with background checks is you’re never going to get criminals to go through universal background checks,” he argued, unwilling to admit that deterring criminals from buying guns is a good thing, even if some eventually get theirs on the black market.
Surely LaPierre understands that, but much of his performance was about concealing inconvenient realities. When former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords made a brief and emotional plea for gun control at the hearing, LaPierre was hidden away a few rows back, in the last seat of the row. This minimized the chance that he’d be in the camera shot with the popular Giffords, who lost much of her ability to speak and walk when a gunman with a history of psychiatric disorders shot her in the head.
The NRA chief made all the well-known arguments against gun laws; he reminded senators that the founders didn’t want Americans to “live under tyranny,” and he agreed with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) that the proposed ban on assault weapons merely targets “cosmetic features” of guns. LaPierre also added the novel idea that people may need guns if they are “abandoned by their government if a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits.”
Most people don’t have such apocalyptic paranoia. But LaPierre’s job is to stir up the active minority who are frightened and resentful. “If you’re in the elite, you get bodyguards,” he told the senators. “You get high-cap mags with semiautomatics protecting this whole Capitol. The titans of industry get the bodyguards.” He said it’s only “the hardworking, law-abiding, taxpaying American that we’re going to make the least capable of defending themselves.”
Minutes after that denunciation of the well-protected elites, LaPierre rejoined his bodyguards, who were waiting in a back room.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 30, 2013
“A Complete Reversal”: Wayne LaPierre Flip-Flops On Background Checks During Contentious Hearing
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre strenuously opposed new gun laws — including expanding the background check system — during a contentious Wednesday morning hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
When committee chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) pressed LaPierre on his opposition to the universal background check, LaPierre repeatedly placed blame on the law currently in place that fails to prosecute individuals who are denied to purchase and own guns. “None of it makes any sense in the real world!” LaPierre said of background checks, after arguing that they would only impact “the little guy,” while criminals continue to buy guns illegally.
LaPierre’s reasoning drew a sharp rebuke from Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who heatedly told LaPierre, “criminals won’t go to purchase the guns, because there will be a background check! We’ll stop them from the original purchase,” adding, “You missed that point completely!”
LaPierre’s position is a complete reversal from his 1999 testimony, when he told the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime, “We think it’s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone.”
Despite LaPierre’s bluster, a majority of gun owners actually disagree with him on background checks. According to a Johns Hopkins Center For Gun Policy and Research survey conducted in October 2012, “82 percent favored mandatory background checks for all firearms sales, not just for those by licensed dealers.”
Under the current laws, the federal government has prosecuted 44 individuals out of the 80,000-plus who have lied about their criminal histories in an effort to obtain a gun. Despite the fact that the federal government has prosecuted few, there is no doubt that it has in fact kept guns out of the wrong hands.
Testimonies also came from Captain Mark Kelly, husband of former representative Gabrielle Giffords, victim of Jared Loughner’s Tucson, AZ shooting rampage in 2011, Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University and policy analyst for the Cato Institute David Kopel, Police Chief James Johnson of the Baltimore Police Department, and Gayle Trotter, attorney and Senior Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
The hearing began with an emotional appeal from Giffords, who still struggles with her speech as a result of her injuries. “Too many children are dying. We must do something,” Giffords said. “It will be hard, but the time is now. You must act. Be bold, be courageous. Americans are counting on you.”
Kelly maintained that as a gun owner, that “right demands responsibility,” a responsibility that the U.S. is failing to uphold in allowing dangerous individuals to obtain dangerous weapons.
Like Kelly, Chief Johnson — who has over 30 years of experience in law enforcement — spoke out in full support of expanding background checks to private gun sellers and gun shows, declaring, “The best way to stop a bad guy from getting a gun in the first place is a good background check.”
Other individuals on the panel, like David Kopel and Gayle Trotter, chose to focus on the proposal to place armed guards in every school and guns in the hands of teachers, rather than amending the law to assure that the wrong individuals can’t obtain guns in the first place. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), agreed with them, warning that because of America’s fiscal situation, “there will be less police officers, not more, in the next decade.” For Graham – who has received contributions from the NRA — the solution to this problem is not increasing funding for trained professionals like Chief Johnson, but having more Americans to arm themselves (a goal that universal background checks would hinder).
Although he largely opposes gun control, Kopel did argue that gun control does not violate the Second Amendment, so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of responsible Americans. This raised the question of why he opposes the proposed reform efforts; after all, common-sense restrictions on unnecessary guns and magazines and a repair to the current federal background check system would pose no discernible threat to any responsible gun owners.
Even as the senators were debating gun violence on Capitol Hill, another mass shooting was taking place in Phoenix, Arizona.
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, January 30, 2013
“The Book Of Cons, 3:16”: God Wants You To Have An Assault Rifle
Legislation aimed at reducing gun violence is “a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society,” according to an article published in the leading conservative opinion journal National Review.
The author, David French, interprets the Christian Bible as granting everyone a right to self-defense. He suggests that this, if true, means that God’s will is that people have access to guns, as they are the means for self defense:
In fact, Jesus’s disciples carried swords, and Jesus even said in some contexts the unarmed should arm themselves…What does all this mean? Essentially that gun control represents not merely a limitation on a constitutional right but a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society. All rights — of course — are subject to some limits (the right of free speech is not unlimited, for example), and there is much room for debate on the extent of those limits, but state action against the right of self-defense is by default a violation of the natural rights of man, and the state’s political judgment about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism and must overcome a heavy burden of justification.
Even if French is right about the Christian view of self-defense (though Jesus did have choice words about “turning the other cheek“), it’s a logical fallacy to say this implies anything about restrictions on access to guns. Saying that people have a right to defend themselves if attacked isn’t the same thing as saying they should have a right to possess any conceivable means of defending themselves – presumably, French is fine with banning grenade launchers. The burden, instead, is on French to prove that universal background checks or limitations on assault weapon ownership somehow prevent people from defending themselves; to prove, in other words, that gun regulation is actually a restriction on the right of self-defense proper rather than a crime-prevention statute.
Moreover, French is wrong about the role of “self-defense” in a democracy. He cites John Locke, enlightenment philosopher and inspiration for the American Revolution, to suggest that gun rights are “fundamental rights of nature.” But as Ari Kohen, a professor of political theory at the University of Nebraska, points out, French radically misinterprets Locke:
But for people to establish a political community, Locke asserts that people must give up to the government their natural right to punish criminal behavior and agree to have the government settle grievances. This is why we have standing laws that are meant to be applied equally by independent officers of the law and by the courts.
Locke, as Kohen says, held that our right to use force was necessarily limited by the creation of legitimate government — that’s why we have police. This means that the government can limit access to certain weapons as means of discharging its responsibility to keep the peace. While the government may not be able to legitimately ban you from say, killing a home invader who’s brandishing a gun, it also can take reasonable steps to prevent criminals from being able to threaten you with arms in the first place without having to overcome a “heavy burden of justification.”
This isn’t the first questionable gun piece published in National Review. After the Newtown shooting, its editors suggested that mass school shootings were the price we pay for the Second Amendment. One of its writers, Charlotte Allen, infamously wrote that the Newtown massacre happened because there were too many female teachers.
By: Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress, January 28, 2013
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