“Looking For America”: We’re Doing This To Ourselves Because We Don’t Know Who We Are Anymore
“I’m sorry,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, her voice breaking. “I’m having a really tough time.”
She’s the former nurse from Long Island who ran for Congress in 1996 as a crusader against gun violence after her husband and son were victims of a mass shooting on a commuter train. On Friday morning, McCarthy said, she began her day by giving an interview to a journalist who was writing a general story about “how victims feel when a tragedy happens.”
“And then 15 minutes later, a tragedy happens.”
McCarthy, whose husband died and son was critically wounded, is by now a practiced hand at speaking out when a deranged man with a lot of firepower runs amok. But the slaughter of 20 small children and seven adults in Connecticut left her choked up and speechless.
“I just don’t know what this country’s coming to. I don’t know who we are any more,” she said.
President Obama was overwhelmed as well, when he attempted to comfort the nation. It was his third such address in the wake of a soul-wrenching mass shooting. “They had their entire lives ahead of them,” he said, and he had trouble saying anything more.
It was, of course, a tragedy. Yet tragedies happen all the time. Terrible storms strike. Cars crash. Random violence occurs. As long as we’re human, we’ll never be invulnerable.
But when a gunman takes out kindergartners in a bucolic Connecticut suburb, three days after a gunman shot up a mall in Oregon, in the same year as fatal mass shootings in Minneapolis, in Tulsa, in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, in a theater in Colorado, a coffee bar in Seattle and a college in California — then we’re doing this to ourselves.
We know the story. The shooter is a man, usually a young man, often with a history of mental illness. Sometimes in a rage over a lost job, sometimes just completely unhinged. In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the air was full of experts discussing the importance of psychological counseling. “We need to look at what drives a crazy person to do these kind of actions,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the House.
Every country has a sizable contingent of mentally ill citizens. We’re the one that gives them the technological power to play god.
This is all about guns — access to guns and the ever-increasing firepower of guns. Over the past few years we’ve seen one shooting after another in which the killer was wielding weapons holding 30, 50, 100 bullets. I’m tired of hearing fellow citizens argue that you need that kind of firepower because it’s a pain to reload when you’re shooting clay pigeons. Or that the founding fathers specifically wanted to make sure Americans retained their right to carry rifles capable of mowing down dozens of people in a couple of minutes.
Recently the Michigan House of Representatives passed and sent to the governor a bill that, among other things, makes it easy for people to carry concealed weapons in schools. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday, a spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger said that it might have meant “the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders.” This is a popular theory of civic self-defense that discounts endless evidence that in a sudden crisis, civilians with guns either fail to respond or respond by firing at the wrong target.
It was perhaps the second-most awful remark on one of the worst days in American history, coming up behind Mike Huckabee’s asking that since prayer is banned from public schools, “should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”
We will undoubtedly have arguments about whether tougher regulation on gun sales or extra bullet capacity would have made a difference in Connecticut. In a way it doesn’t matter. America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. We have come to regard ourselves — and the world has come to regard us — as a country that’s so gun happy that the right to traffic freely in the most obscene quantities of weapons is regarded as far more precious than an American’s right to health care or a good education.
We have to make ourselves better. Otherwise, the story from Connecticut is too unspeakable to bear.
Nearly two years ago, after Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head in a mass shooting in Arizona, the White House sent up signals that Obama was preparing to do something. “I wouldn’t rule out that at some point the president talks about the issues surrounding gun violence,” said his press secretary at the time, Robert Gibbs.
On Friday, the president said: “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”
Time passes. And here we are.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 14, 2012
“The Perpetually Untimely Conversation”: The Second Amendment And The Fantasy Of Revolution
Even though the National Rifle Association and its supporters believe that there is never any good time to have a national conversation about gun policy in the United States, the latest example in a too-long string of mass murders has indeed prompted calls for exactly such a dialogue. These conversations proceed along the same lines every single time one of these incidents occurs. On one side are the people who think it should be at least somewhat harder, if not illegal, to own assault rifles and 100-round clips. These people tend to think that at the very least, we need to make sure that random individuals are not able to buy these kinds of weapons anonymously and with no background check, so at the very least we can make sure that violent criminals aren’t stocking up on a full arsenal.
The arguers on the other side of this perpetually untimely conversation say that conversely, the problem isn’t too many guns, but not enough guns. That if only there had been more people with loaded guns who felt like they could be heroes in a loud, dark theater among the screaming, the tear gas, and the rapid fire of 71 shots from a semiautomatic weapon, that the shooter could have been neutralized. Whether or not the people who claim this have ever been in a dark theater filled with tear gas and terrified innocent victims attempting to avoid the storm of bullets from a shooter who could be anywhere is immaterial: It is a theoretical possibility to live out a heroic fantasy, and so we must keep the dream alive.
But even more than that, they argue, the Second Amendment is not about the rights of hunters, or those who wish to have weapons to defend their persons and property against intruders—again, things for which an AK47 might not be the best choice. Indeed, the Amendment should specifically protect the right to own assault rifles because the original intention is to allow citizens to resist the military of an attempted takeover by a tyrannical federal government—the precise fear of which has for some reason risen significantly since Barack Obama was elected as president. But more on that later.
This brings up a question: Has anyone actually thought through the realities of staging a domestic insurgency against the armed forces of the United States?
Ignoring for a moment the paradoxical reality that the people who so fervently believe that they need assault rifles to protect themselves against our own military are so often the same people arguing that we should continue to spend more money on that same military than all other countries spend on theirs combined, the first conclusion anyone would come to is that a successful domestic insurgency would need far more than than an assault rifle. When the Second Amendment was written in the late 18th century, the main weapons of war consisted of muskets and flintlock pistols. There are two very worthwhile things to note about this period in weaponry: First, it would have been very difficult for any individual to walk into a crowded theater and commit a massacre with one of these weapons, mainly because by the time the shooter had managed to reload the weapon, everyone could have already run out of the theater, or even escaped at a leisurely stroll after pulling the assailant’s knickerbockers over his wig. But secondly, a group of ordinary citizens, so armed and with the proper training, could pose a significant threat to an invading army, which would be comparably armed.
These days? Things are obviously somewhat different. This will become especially obvious should one find themselves face-to-face with an M1A1 Abrams tank with a Predator drone hovering above raining down hellfire missiles from the sky. One doesn’t need field tests or a war games simulation to realize that even military-grade infantry weapons won’t be very effective against that type of technological terror. If we’re serious about enabling citizens to resist a tyrannical takeover by our nation’s armed forces, it’s immediately clear that we would need to start talking about legalizing far more than just guns. Any well-armed insurgency will need rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles; beyond that, we should be talking about making it legal for pilots to retrofit any aircraft they own with whatever caliber of cannon their planes will support.
But previous history has taught us that perhaps the most effective insurgency weapon is the Improvised Explosive Device. If we are serious about defending American liberty against our own military, it’s clear that we need our patriotic bomb-makers to have the freedoms they need to defend our country. As long as our government is monitoring and regulating purchases of fertilizers and other nitrates that could be used to make the explosives we need for self-defense, it’s quite clear we can’t have the freedoms we deserve to defend ourselves against tyranny. And while we’re at it, our nation’s sovereign citizens shouldn’t be bound by United Nations treaties on self-defense items like chemical and biological weapons. The fear of anthrax or sarin gas might be the only thing that keeps our own tyrannical military from attempting to overwhelm our hard-earned freedoms. And while it’s doubtful that any individual would have the wherewithal to build or acquire their own suitcase nuke, that person should certainly be free to do so: It’s the ultimate in self-defense, is it not? The sum of all fears?
But let’s conclude back in the real world. If the types who advocate for the Second Amendment as defense against tyranny were serious about their motivations, they would very quickly realize the inconsistency of having their arguments apply to guns alone, and seek to expand its scope to apply to weapons that actually had a hope of doing the duty for which they believe the Constitution provides. But those who say they dream of rebellion do no such thing, meaning that they either haven’t thought through the consequences of their ideology, or that it is a cover for a motivation that dares not speak its name in polite circles, even if right-wing radio shock jock Neal Boortz did:
And I’ll tell you what it’s gonna take. You people, you are – you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city. And let their — let their mommas — let their mommas say, “He was a good boy. He just fell in with the good crowd.” And then lock her ass up.
Now that Barack Obama is the president, it’s simply that the people who fantasize about “standing their ground” against minorities and the people who fantasize about defending themselves against an intrusive government just happen to have even more interests in common.
By: Dante Atkins, Daily Kos, July 29, 2012
“The Care Bears Plan”: Mitt Romney Seems Confused About Aurora
Mitt Romney may need to brush up on how he handles the topic of gun control, because what he said in an interview today with Brian Williams made no sense. Asked whether he could “see the argument” of people who question whether citizens should be allowed to buy AR-15 assault rifles or purchase 6,000 rounds of ammunition online, Romney responded:
ROMNEY: “Well this person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them. And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential, to improve the lots of the American people.”
Let’s break this down, piece by piece:
“Well this person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them.”
We don’t yet know what chemicals Holmes used to make his booby traps or how he acquired them. But the weapons he used — including a semiautomatic assault rifle with a 100-round magazine — to actually shoot dozens of people were all purchased legally. That’s, uh, why he had them.
“And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t.”
Literally nobody believes that stricter gun-control laws would “make all bad things go away.” The point is to save lives by making it more difficult to kill people. Romney knows this — after all, he signed an assault-weapon ban into law as governor of Massachusetts.
“Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential to improve the lots of the American people.”
Is that his actual plan? Let’s call up the Care Bears, maybe they can bathe all of America in the glow of their belly-rays and dissuade everyone from carrying out any more massacres.
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, July 25, 2012
“Unforgivable Stupidity”: Rep Louie Gohmert Shows How Not To Respond To A Tragedy
In the wake of tragic gun violence, most politicians realize the decent, responsible thing to do is send sympathies to those affected while leaving politics out of it. Others aren’t as sensible.
After the Columbine massacre, for example, then-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) blamed science textbooks for the murders: “Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup.”
In 2007, after the Virginia Tech massacre, Newt Gingrich blamed liberals for supporting “situation ethics,” adding, “Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you’re committing an act of evil.” Gingrich, explaining the VT tragedy, went on to condemn Halloween costumes and the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law.
And this morning, after the slayings in Aurora, Louie Gohmert weighed in with some stupidity of his own.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.
During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation’s “Istook Live!” show, Gohmert was asked why he believes such senseless acts of violence take place. Gohmert responded by talking about the weakening of Christian values in the country.
“Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important,” he said. “Whether it’s John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people … Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters. We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country.”
“You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of a derelict takes place.”
I see. So, in the mind of this strange Republican congressman, a madman killed 12 people because of … the separation of church and State? The First Amendment is to blame for a shooting spree in a movie theater?
If decency had any place in American politics, this would be an immediate career-ender for the ridiculous congressman from Texas. Some political missteps are simply unforgivable.
Update: Gohmert also wondered aloud why no one else in the theater was armed, complaining that the victims should have shot back.
By: Steve Beneb, The Maddow Blog, July 20, 2012
“A Line In The Sand”: Sen Ron Johnson, “High-Capacity Magazines Are A Constitutional Right”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) drew a fairly strict line in the sand on Sunday with respect to the coming debate over gun control, suggesting that there is a constitutional right to buy high-capacity clips and magazines.
“Does something that would limit magazines that could carry 100 rounds, would that infringe on the constitutional right?” host Chris Wallace asked Johnson on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I believe so,” Johnson replied. “People will talk about unusually lethal weapons, that could be potentially a discussion you could have. But the fact of the matter is there are 30-round magazines that are just common. You simply can’t keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals who want to do harm. And when you try to do it, you restrict our freedoms.”
High-capacity magazines were banned under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994 and which expired 10 years later. Since then, gun control advocates have focused their attention on them in their efforts to curb gun-related violence.
Opponents of restrictive gun laws have responded by arguing that incidents of violence involving high-capacity magazines are actually quite rare, and that shootings involving handguns are far more common.
When former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot in Tucson, the topic finally received national attention. The man who has been charged with killing six people in the attack, along with wounding Giffords and 12 others, used a high-capacity magazine to fire off more than 30 shots before reloading.
James Holmes, who allegedly killed 12 people and wounded 58 others Friday morning in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater, reportedly used a high-capacity magazine to fire off multiple rounds without having to reload.
The office of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) told The Huffington Post on Friday that he would be making a renewed push for legislation that would ban high-capacity magazines.
Johnson is a conservative member of the Republican Party. But support for high-capacity magazines, even in the wake of the Aurora shooting, extends far beyond him. Former Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.), a moderate Republican who is running for Senate, said Friday he opposes a ban on these magazines, despite having voted for the assault weapons ban in 1993 and co-sponsoring a reauthorization bill in 2008.
By: Sam Stein, The Huffington Post, July 22, 2012
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