“The Elephant Doesn’t Exist”: Guns And The Tyranny Of Extreme Rhetoric
Let’s say you’re making lunch in the kitchen while your kids play in the living room. When you come in with their mid-day meal, the place is a disaster. You look at them. They look at you. And before you know it they’re blurting out something like “the elephant did it!”
Now, I suppose there’s something to be said for that argument. It takes a quick wit. Or at least a keen sense of mammalogy. But it’s got one fundamental flaw: There is no elephant. And you know that’s true no matter how hard they argue otherwise.
These days, some on the right have seized on an invisible elephant all their own. They’ve named him Tyranny, and to hear them tell it, he’s big, he’s scary, and he’s tearing up the place. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t exist—but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to convince the rest of us that he does.
Their latest effort came in the form of a Scott Rasmussen poll that found “65 percent See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny.” If it’s true, that’s quite a finding. It means most of us believe that our government may descend into tyranny and that guns are the right way to protect ourselves from that eventuality.
Of course, there’s good reason to doubt Rasmussen: His polls reliably lean to the right. But for the sake of argument let’s take his findings on their face. How should we reconcile them with the great many other polls that suggest broadening support for gun control? The 55 percent in a CNN/Time poll who say gun controls should be tightened. The 58 percent in an ABC/Washington Post poll who back an assault weapons ban. The 63 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll who support banning high capacity magazines. The 78 percent in the same poll who favor creating a database to track all gun sales in the United States.
If you take the Rasmussen poll on the one hand and all the other polls on the other, it can only mean that there are many millions of us who somehow believe both that Americans need guns to protect ourselves from a government that may turn tyrannical and that we should make it harder for Americans to get guns. This is a, ahem, nuance that Rasmussen fails to address.
And then of course, there’s this: According to a recent Pew survey, only 33 percent of Americans have a gun in their home at all. If so many of us really think that tyranny looms and that guns are our protection but so few of us actually own them…well, we must be a pretty self-destructive lot.
As it happens, there was another poll in the field at around the same time as Rasmussen’s that was about the same issue, and conducted by a similarly conservative pollster—Wenzel Strategies (the pollster for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, among others). Wenzel asked respondents whether they believed the Second Amendment “exists to allow Americans to have small arms for hunting and self-protection” or “to give Americans the ability to defend themselves against government if it becomes tyrannical?” The results? Forty-seven percent said it’s just for hunting and self-protection. A whopping 8 percent said it’s just to defend against tyranny. And 40 percent said all of the above.
In other words, two polls that can be relied on to skew right, but on the question of tyranny and guns, Rasmussen’s big majority turns into Wenzel’s minority. And a less partisan researcher would presumably find that support is actually significantly lower than is suggested in both.
None of this, however, put the brakes on the Rasmussen poll among the conservative press and punditry. Breitbart, NewsMax, FreedomWorks, etc. all quickly linked to or posted stories like the one Katie Pavlich authored at TownHall.com reporting that “an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the Second Amendment and gun rights are necessary to protect against tyranny.”
Look, I don’t put any more stock in Wenzel than I do Rasmussen. In my view, they both poll in the service of ideology rather than in an effort to uncover actual attitudes and beliefs. (Wenzel used his findings, for example, to suggest that we are more at risk of tyrannical takeover precisely because we don’t think it’s going to happen. Sigh.) And I have no doubt that there are those who actually believe that tyranny is in the offing. But the fact is, most of us, regardless of our political or ideological stripe, don’t believe that. We know the difference between our government and that of other countries in world, between Saddam Hussein and John Boehner. The former subjected Iraqis to years of death squads and oppression. That’s a tyrant. The latter’s subjected Americans to years of weepy incompetence. That’s irritating.
That doesn’t make the tyrannists’ rhetoric any less insidious, however. In asking us to conceive of an America that is profoundly different from the one in which we actually live they seek to conform our public policy to threats that exist only in some kind of make-believe place. When they are successful, the mainstreaming of lunatic ideas (like: We live under the threat of tyranny) makes possible ever more extreme policies (like: We all must have the right to semi-automatic weapons). And when we let that happen, nightmares of a very different kind than those conjured up by the ideologues really do come true.
When you take the invisible elephant out of your living room, you can clearly see what caused the mess (your kids.) And when you take the false threat of tyranny out of the equation, the case against assault weapons is pretty clear too (we don’t need them).
The elephant doesn’t exist. And it’s time for us to say so.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, January 24, 2013
“Violent And Filled With Rage”: American Gun Violence Is An Epidemic
Just another day in gunner’s paradise…
Another day, another shooting. I would imagine if this continues, and I fear it might, that Americans will become desensitized—if they haven’t already. Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Oregon, Newtown, Albuquerque, and now Houston. Of course there will be those that say, well, at least it wasn’t a massacre. Hmm…
The problem is, they’re all linked by three things: guns, violence, and rage.
We as a society have to ask ourselves, why is it that our neighbors to the north, Canada, have guns, hunt, watch the same TV shows and movies as we do—why do we have a level of violence that is simply not on par with the rest of the Western world? And if we look to the Eastern world, like Japan; they not only watch our movies, but many Japanese films and certainly video games that are much more violent. But, they don’t have the guns.
So those of us on the left propose to reduce the type of guns our society, which is obviously very violent and filled with rage—has access to. Those on the right say that won’t stop gun violence. And they’re right. It’s a piece of a much needed, comprehensive, multifacted approach to save our kids, our future, and dare I say our country, from…ourselves.
Now some on both the left and right will blame mental illness. Sorry folks, not everyone who’s violent, enraged, owns a gun, and uses it suffers from mental illness. And with the National Rifle Association and others on the right pushing back on ideas such as tougher background checks, like at gun shows. Well, I guess we’ll keep those mentally ill types pretty well armed.
And of course there are the movies, television, and video games. As someone who lives in Los Angeles and lives about 20 minutes from La La Land (a.k.a. Hollywood), let me explain something to you: Hollywood’s a business. And businesses care about one thing: money. Their bottom line. Here’s a simple, little economic principle: supply and demand. You think the movies and TV shows our kids are watching are too violent? Then stop buying tickets. If you line up en masse for those cute romantic comedies and ignore the more violent Terminator-type films, Hollywood will supply you with what you demand.
So since some say we can’t blame the guns, some say we can’t blame the people owning the guns, some say it’s the mentally ill but don’t want further controls and certainly don’t want to pay for any type of mental illness programs or hospitals or medications—since we’re the ones buying those violent video games, TV shows, and movies, what’s left?
Look in the mirror.
As the parent or a 4 and 5 year old, I notice that the way I handle my stress is the way they handle theirs. They’re imitators. So for every parent out there that’s watching Die Hard or The Godfather in front of your toddler and you think they’re too busy playing with their Elmo, think again. Their brain is absorbing that flick, frame by frame. And for those of you who knock out a wall, or perhaps your wife or girlfriend every time you get ticked off, our kids are watching.
America, we are responsible for those that died. For ignoring our culture of rage and violence far too long…and for not correcting those behaviors within ourselves. This isn’t just systemic, it’s epidemic. So what are we as a nation going to do about it?
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, January 23, 2013
“Evidence And Logic Are Beside The Point”: Newtown Truthers Follow The NRA’s Playbook
Conceived in a dream of reason, what the Internet too often reveals is mass credulousness and fathomless irrationality. According to Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald, a video depicting the Newtown, CT elementary school massacre as a government-sponsored hoax has drawn 8.5 million views on YouTube.
No doubt many viewers were drawn by idle curiosity or sheer incredulity. What would “evidence” for so transparently preposterous an allegation consist of? Nevertheless, there appear to be thousands of True Believers.
Try googling “Emilie Parker alive,” to sample the crazy.
Adepts claim that a photograph of a young girl sitting in President Obama’s lap reveals that six-year-old Emilie Parker was not murdered along with 19 classmates at Sandy Hook elementary as reported. Supposedly, the photo reveals a telltale blunder.
In reality, the child in the photograph is Emilie’s little sister, Madeline.
But why go on? There’s plenty more in the same dogged, delusional vein. Debunk one aspect of the conspiracy, and a dozen absurdities replace it. To anybody capable of imagining that staging the Sandy Hook tragedy would even be possible—requiring, as it would, the active cooperation of half the population of Connecticut—mere evidence and logic are beside the point.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Apart from religion, more Americans appear to be nuts on the subject of guns than all other topics. The National Rifle Association has raised and spent millions in recent years peddling scare stories about President Obama’s secret plan to abolish the Second Amendment, confiscate everybody’s deer rifles and set up a gun-free dictatorship.
Newtown conspiracy theories are only incrementally madder spinoffs of the NRA’s master narrative. Yet its leaders are treated as VIPs in newsrooms and TV studios. Why?
To Believers, guns have become fetish objects in American popular culture, having magical potency. Witness Bushmaster Firearms’ advertising its .223 caliber AR-15—Newtown killer Adam Lanza’s weapon—with the slogan: “Consider your Man Card reissued.”
Viagra ads are more subtle.
Hence conversations with gun cultists tend to be conducted in the dualistic, all-or-nothing terms of fundamentalist theology. Although polls have shown that large majorities of gun owners favor, for example, improved background checks to make it harder for criminals and severely mentally ill people to acquire deadly weapons, cultists see all such legislation in apocalyptic terms. All regulation amounts to total confiscation.
Hollywood’s equally to blame. About half the emails I get on this topic invoke the Red Dawn fantasy, although it’s not foreign communists people imagine taking to the hills to fight. It’s mainly tyrannical US government SWAT teams intent upon seizing their personal arsenals and making them eat arugula that they’re determined to repel by force of arms.
I’m always tempted to warn these jokers that I’ve forwarded their messages to the Obama White House for inclusion on Big Brother’s Hellfire drone strike list, but I’m afraid most wouldn’t get the joke. Tanks, helicopter gunships and drones have pretty much put an end to the adolescent fantasy of plucky survivalists taking on the U.S. Marines. Everywhere except in movies and at certain kinds of gun shows, that is.
Then there are the Lethal Weapon/Die Hard revenge comedies I’m partial to myself: the Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis vehicles where a wisecracking hero and his plucky sidekick shoot their way through legions of wicked, heavily armed villains with universally poor marksmanship.
Let’s put it this way: Ever seen a headline like this? “LAPD Detective Kills 17 Gangsters in Nightclub Shootout” (Lethal Weapon) Or this? “Vacationing Cop Foils Xmas Plot; 34 Terrorists Slain.” (Die Hard)
Of course not. Because the working part of your brain understands that these films bear approximately the same relationship to reality as a Roadrunner cartoon.
Sometimes I think it’s mainly about the wisecracks.
“Go ahead, make my day.” The average dweeb wishes he could say something so clever to a rude supermarket bag boy, much less to a lone demento with a .357 mag.
However, deep in many of our lizard brains the Dirty Harry fantasy lurks nevertheless. NRA president Wayne LaPierre invoked it during his notorious Newtown press conference. You know, the bit about a good guy with a gun shooting it out with a bad guy with a gun—inside a first-grade classroom.
That’s why the single most useful piece of journalism since Newtown may be Amanda Ripley’s “Your Brain in a Shootout: Guns, Fear and Flawed Instincts.” Writing for Time, Ripley interviewed highly trained, experienced cops and soldiers who talked to her bluntly about the crazy, jagged chaos of armed combat.
“[R]esearch on actual gunfights,” she writes “the kind that happen not in a politician’s head but in fluorescent-lit stairwells and strip-mall restaurants around America, reveals [that]…Winning a gunfight without shooting innocent people typically requires realistic, expensive training and a special kind of person.”
And normally not the kind of person, oddly enough, that makes an excellent kindergarten teacher.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 22, 2013
“A Line In The Sand”: The NRA Won’t Support Arizona’s New Gun Bill
Arizona is a place where you can get a family photograph with Santa holding an AK-47, where state lawmakers point pink pistols at reporters, and where men tote AR-15s to political protests. And if one state representative gets his way, gun-loving Arizonans won’t have to worry about pesky federal gun control laws, because it will be illegal to enforce them.
Republican state Rep. Steve Smith proposed a bill last week that would prohibit public officials in the state from following any federal gun laws or regulations, fearing an effort by the Obama administration to impose harsh new restrictions on firearms. That means no background checks, no restrictions on automatic weapons or grenade launchers, and no prohibition on sale to the mentally ill, unless the state enacts its own restrictions, none of which are laid out in Smith’s bill.
While there is no penalty specified for state and local officials who follow federal law, federal judges or law enforcement agents would face felony charges punishable by up to a year in state prison. “Here’s a line in the sand: Thanks, but no thanks. Stay out with your federal regulations you’re going to impose on us,” Smith said.
HB 2291 would almost certainly be unconstitutional, as federal law trumps state law, and Smith acknowledged that there would probably be legal challenges that would have to be worked out in the courts. But he appears to be trying to get around this problem by making his legislation apply only to firearms that are manufactured in and never leave the state of Arizona, presumably in an attempt to thwart the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate trade. Still, the Supreme Court has not been sympathetic to similar arguments.
And the Constitution isn’t Smith’s only problem; he’s catching some friendly fire too. Todd Rathner, an Arizona resident who sits on the board of the National Rifle Association, told the Capitol News Service that he doesn’t like the bill because of what it would do to gun dealers, who must receive federal licenses and comply with federal regulations.
“I worry about putting federal firearms licensees in the middle of a fight between us and the federal government,” he said. “It puts them between a rock and a hard place because they worry about committing a federal crime or a state crime.”
Indeed, Smith’s law specifies that firearms dealers would be barred from following the regulations mandated by the federal government to maintain their license. Still, Rathner said of Smith’s proposal, “I like the message he’s trying to send.”
Arizona isn’t the only state considering what amounts to a lite form of secession over guns. In Mississippi, Gov. Phil Bryant and state House Speaker Philip Gunn have both said they intend to block any new Obama executive orders on gun control. South Carolina lawmakers have made similar moves as well. But Arizona’s law goes much further, by not only restricting new regulations but also all existing ones, targeting “any act, law, statute, rule or regulation” from Washington on guns.
Also, keep in mind that the NRA’s objection to the legislation is not that it is unconstitutional or that it might make it easier for criminals to acquire weapons, but that it would hurt firearms dealers. If Smith rewrote the law to exempt dealers, one wonders if the NRA would be OK with the rest of it.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, January 23, 2013
“Nothing Short Of Horrifying”: Here A Gun, There A Gun, Everywhere A Gun
As Jaime and I noted yesterday, many Democratic politicians feel the need to preface any discussion of guns with an assurance that they, too, own guns and love to shoot, as though that were the price of admission to a debate on the topic. But what you seldom hear is anyone, politician or otherwise, say, “I don’t own a gun and I don’t ever intend to” as a statement of identity, defining a perspective that carries moral weight equal to that of gun owners. So it was good to see Josh Marshall, in a thoughtful post, say, “Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. And I have my own set of rights not to have gun culture run roughshod over me.” Let me tell you my perspective on this, and offer some thoughts on the question of what sort of a society we want to have when it comes to the question of guns. Because there are two radically different visions that are clashing here.
For the record, I, too, am not a gun owner (you’re shocked to learn this, I know). I took riflery at camp as a kid, shooting a .22 at paper targets (and when you achieved each new level of marksmanship, you got a certificate from the NRA!), and I’ve held unloaded guns a few times. I understand the attraction of guns. They give you a feeling of power and potency, and they’re fun to shoot, which is why every little boy loves playing with toy guns. But in the town where I grew up, you never saw a gun that wasn’t in a cop’s holster. If any of my classmates’ parents had them (and I’m sure some did), they never mentioned it, and my own parents would sooner have adopted a pack of hyenas than brought a gun into our home. As far as that community was concerned, the relative absence of guns was one of the things that made it a nice place to live. It wasn’t because everyone got together and took a vote on it, but that absence was nevertheless an expression of the community’s collective will.
I’m sure that many gun advocates would hear that and say, “Don’t you realize how vulnerable you all were? You should have been armed!” But the truth is we weren’t vulnerable (crime was low; I have a vague memory of one murder that happened during my entire childhood but I could be imagining it), and although as kids we always complained that the town was boring, everyone seemed pretty happy with the security situation. And if one day, a few of the town’s citizens started letting everyone know that they were now carrying firearms when they were down at the drugstore or the bank, it wouldn’t have made anyone feel safer. Just the opposite, in fact. It would have changed everything for the worse.
What I’m getting at is that one of the things that makes a society work is that people have rights that are protected in the law, but they also exercise those rights with consideration for the society’s other members. For instance, we have a strong commitment to freedom of expression, such that many things that would be deemed obscene and get you tossed in jail in other countries are tolerated here. So if I want do a performance art piece that involves lots of cursing and tossing about bodily fluids, I can do it. But I’m not going to do it on the sidewalk in front of your house during dinner time, not because I don’t have the right, but because that would make me an asshole. In the exercising of my rights, I’d be changing the conditions of your existence, even for a brief time, in a way that you’d find unpleasant. So because I value having a society where we all live together, I’ll choose to find a theater to put on my performance, and you can choose to come see it or not. In the same way, if you choose to have a gun in your home because you think it protects you, that’s your right. I’m going to choose not to let my kid come play with your kid at your house, and we can all get along.
According to the Constitution, you have a right to own a gun. I’ll be honest and say that I wish it weren’t so; the fantasies the most extreme gun advocates notwithstanding, our liberty is protected by our laws and institutions, not by our ability to wage war on our government. Canadians and Britons and French people aren’t any less free than we are because they are less able to start killing cops and soldiers when they decide the time for insurrection has come. Nevertheless, that basic right exists and it isn’t going to be taken away. But the rest of us should also be able to say that there are limits to how far your exercising that right should be allowed to change the rest of our lives, and if necessary the law should enforce those limits.
As I’ve written before, the goal of many gun advocates, particularly those who promote concealed carry, is that we make it so as many people as possible take as many guns as possible into as many places as possible. That’s been the focus of their legislative efforts in recent years, not only passing concealed carry laws nearly everywhere, but also passing laws to make you able to take guns into bars, schools, government buildings, houses of worship, and so on, and also advocating for laws that would let you take your guns to communities where it would be otherwise illegal to carry them. Which would mean that your right to carry your gun trumps the right of everyone else to say, this is a place where we’ve decided we don’t want people bringing guns.
Is it possible that on my next visit to the local coffee place, a madman might come and shoot the place up? Yes, it’s possible. And is it possible that if half the patrons were armed, one of them might be able to take him down and limit the number of people he killed? Yes, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll win the next Powerball. But if holding out that infinitesimal possibility means that every time I go down for a coffee, I’m entering a place full of guns, it’s not a price I’m willing to pay. That’s the decision I’ve made, and it’s the decision that the other people in my community have made as well.
But gun advocates want to create a society governed by fear, or at the very least, make sure that everyone feels the same fear they feel. “An armed society is a polite society,” they like to say, and it’s polite because we’re all terrified of each other. They genuinely believe that that the price of safety is that there should be no place where guns, and the fear and violence they embody, are not present. Not your home, not your kids’ school, not your supermarket, not your church, no place. But for many of us—probably for most of us—that vision of society is nothing short of horrifying.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 18, 2013
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