“Homemade Trail Mix”: Obama-Fearing Gun Nuts Are, Well, Nuts
There seems to be a little confusion on the part of gun enthusiasts about what a second Obama term means for them, and how they can battle any efforts to control their firearms ownership.
First, there are the nervous sorts who raced out and bought guns rights away after President Obama was re-elected. The subtext is that somehow this president will take away their guns—and yet there is no evidence to indicate that. In fact, the opposite is true: Obama has not only not done anything to advance gun control, but he actually expanded gun rights early in his term, signing a law that allows people to bring guns onto federal land.
Nor does the ongoing Democratic majority in the Senate pose a plausible threat. The Democrats, while perhaps at heart in favor of sensible limits on guns, figured out a long time ago that they will only be the majority party if they keep pretty quiet about that—and allow some of their recruits to be staunchly pro-gun.
But while that seems a tad hysterical, as a reaction to Obama’s win, it’s positively rational compared to the behavior of the owner of an Arizona gun shop. Says a full-page newspaper ad in the White Mountain Independent:
If you voted for Barack Obama your business is NOT WELCOME at Southwest Shooting Authority. You have proven you are not responsible enough to own a firearm.
There are some obvious inherent problems with this policy. For one, how will the owner know whom a potential buyer voted for in the election? Secondly, wouldn’t a gun-owning, pro-Obama voter be more likely to pull the party even closer to an embrace of the Second Amendment (omitting the inconvenient part about a “well-regulated militia”)? And if someone opposes gun control, why initiate a de facto limit on gun ownership by denying your firearms business to the 51 percent of voters who indeed chose Obama?
Perhaps the owner believes there will be, as a Texas judge irresponsibly and irrationally predicted, some sort of civil war provoked by Obama’s re-election—and maybe he doesn’t want the other side to have guns. Or maybe it’s just about the “other”—Obama’s race, his unusual name, and the legions of African-Americans, Latinos, gays, lesbians, single women and everyone else who doesn’t fit into the Ward Cleaver mode—that are giving the gunshop owner such a case of the nerves. He might want to get used to it. He’s now in the minority.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, November 19, 2012
“A Wall Street Democrat”: Michael Bloomberg’s True Colors
After last week’s Aurora massacre, Michael Bloomberg emerged as something of a liberal hero by almost single-handedly forcing gun control into the national debate.
Within hours of the tragedy, the New York mayor said in a radio appearance that “soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.” He made the same call in a national television appearance over the weekend, leading a crusade on an issue that the Democratic Party once championed but essentially abandoned a decade ago. President Obama’s call last night for “violence reduction,” hesitant and non-specific though it was, is testament to the traction Bloomberg’s shaming campaign gained this past week.
And now, to follow this all up, Bloomberg is going to host a fundraiser for … a Republican senator who expressed his opposition just this week to reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons.
Granted, Scott Brown, the beneficiary of the Aug. 15 New York City fundraiser Bloomberg is planning, is unusually flexible on Second Amendment issues, at least by the standards of today’s Republican Party. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, he voted in 2004 to extend the state’s assault weapons ban (though he sided against banning the sale of weapons purchased before the ban went into effect). And as a U.S. senator, he broke with the NRA to oppose a bill that would require states to recognize concealed carry permits from other states.
Brown has been leaning on states’ rights to balance his home state’s liberalism on gun issues with the anti-gun control fervor that grips the national GOP, arguing that the federal government has no business passing new laws but that states should be free to do so. This is how he justifies his opposition to reinstating the federal assault weapon ban, which expired eight years ago.
The non-cynical reading of Bloomberg’s decision to raise money for Brown is that the mayor wants to reward what amounts to a modest break with GOP gun control orthodoxy, and to deliver a message to other Republicans that he’s willing to help them if they do the same. At some level, it’s surely a factor here.
But it’s hard to ignore the other major issue that might attract Bloomberg to Brown’s side: Wall Street. This has a little to do with Brown, who voted for the Dodd-Frank reform law but also worked to make it much weaker than it could have been, and a lot to do with his opponent, Elizabeth Warren, whom the Wall Street crowd is treating as its biggest enemy running for office this year.
When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged last fall, Warren boasted that she’d created “much of the intellectual foundation” for the movement’s top 1 percent/bottom 99 percent messaging. Bloomberg, meanwhile, called the protests “not productive” and said that “what they’re trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city.” More recently, Bloomberg argued that President Obama, who is calling for the end of the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $250,000, has “not only embraced the frustration expressed by Occupy Wall Street protesters—which was real—but he adopted their economic populism.”
Bloomberg’s decision to raise money for Brown tells us a lot about his ideology, which is commonly portrayed in the media as centrist and independent. But that’s not really where he’s coming from. On most issues – guns, abortion, gay rights, the environment — Bloomberg is a standard-issue liberal Democrat. On economic issues, he’s a Wall Street Democrat, not averse to raising taxes (he’s even said the Bush rates should expire for everyone) but mindful of and often deferential to the sensitivities of the financial services sector. This puts him on the same page as Bill Clinton, Cory Booker and the many, many other Democrats who’ve cultivated mutually beneficial relationships with Wall Street over the past two decades. Obama himself benefited from Wall Street’s help in 2008, although that won’t really be the case this year.
In this sense, Bloomberg’s support for Brown isn’t really a sign of how independent he is as much as it is an indicator of how far removed Warren is from where most elite Democrats are on Wall Street issues.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 26, 2012
“Political Stockholm Syndrome”: Rationalizing Gutlessness On Guns
Talk about power: The gun lobby barely had to say a word before the media sent advocates of saner gun regulation shuffling off in defeat.
In a political version of Stockholm syndrome, even those who claim to disagree with the National Rifle Association’s absolutist permissiveness on firearms lulled themselves into accepting the status quo by reciting a script of gutless resignation dictated by the merchants of death.
It’s a script built on half-truths and myths. For example, polls showing declining support for gun control in the abstract were widely cited, while polls showing broad backing for carefully tailored laws were largely ignored.
Arguments that gun regulation won’t accomplish anything were justified with citations of academic studies that offer mixed or inconclusive verdicts. In the wake of last week’s killings in Colorado, these studies were deployed to hide the elephant in the room: Our country is the scene of more gun deaths than any other wealthy nation in the world. And it isn’t even close.
A study last year in the Journal of Trauma-Injury Infection & Critical Care analyzed gun death statistics for 2003 from the World Health Organization Mortality Database. It found that 80 percent of all firearms deaths in 23 industrialized countries occurred in the United States. For women, the figure rose to 86 percent; for children age 14 and under, to 87 percent. Can anyone seriously claim that our comparatively lax gun laws had nothing to do with these blood-drenched data?
Some of the evasions are couched in compassion. We are told that the real answer to mass slaughter lies not in better gun statutes but in more attentiveness to those afflicted with psychological problems.
Yes, we need better treatment for the mentally distressed. But while we build a better system of care for mental illness — and, by the way, nobody talks concretely about how to create and pay for such a system — isn’t the more direct solution to ban automatic weapons and oversize magazines so that when someone does go off the rails, it won’t be possible for him to shoot off close to 100 rounds in 100 seconds? And why shouldn’t we make it harder for such a person to buy the instruments of slaughter online?
Regulations, it is said, just won’t work. Bad people will get guns somehow. But if that were true, why did the assault-weapons ban work? If regulation is futile, why do we bother to regulate safety in so many other ways? We manage to prevent needless deaths through rules on refrigerators, automobiles and children’s toys, yet politics blocks us from keeping up to date on the regulation of firearms, whose very purpose is to kill.
We’re told that no laws will end all human tragedies. That’s true. And if the standard for a useful law is that it must put an end to all tragedies and solve all problems, there is no point in passing any laws at all.
Those of us who believe in sensible steps to regulate weapons are supposed to bow before this catalogue of despair and shut up. Most liberal politicians are doing just that. It does not seem to occur to them that the general idea of gun control is bound to recede in the polls when so many advocates of popular regulations give up on making their case.
Bad arguments prevail when they go unanswered. That, by the way, is why it’s not enough for advocates of a sensible course on guns to think their job is over if they write one impassioned column or make one strong statement after a mass killing — and then move on to the latest campaign flap.
The polls still show considerable support for practical measures to curb gun violence. For example: a 2011 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 63 percent of Americans favor a ban on high-capacity magazines; just as many supported an assault-weapons ban. The same year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 83 percent supported financing a system in which people treated for mental illness would be reported to a federal gun registry database to prevent them from buying guns; 71 percent favored this for those treated for drug abuse.
Such numbers should give heart to those who seek solutions to gun violence. Yet so many progressive donors have given up on financing the cause of gun safety. And although President Obama took an important step forward in a New Orleans speech Wednesday night, so many progressive politicians sit back and assume that the gun lobby will win again.
There is a word for this: surrender.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 25, 2012
“A Nation Of Skilled Crimestoppers”: We Should Keep Talking About Our Gun Laws
The wake of a massacre is exactly the right time.
When an event like the mass shooting in Colorado happens, it’s a fair bet that people on every side will take the opportunity to say, “See? This just reinforces what we’ve been telling you all along.” But that’s easier for some than others. I looked around some conservative web sites today to see what their reaction was, and much of it ran to this: Awful liberals are going to use this to push their anti-gun agenda, and they should be ashamed of themselves (see here or here). But is there really anything wrong with taking the events that occur in our country, even horrible ones, and making the connections to our policy and political choices? Isn’t that what people who write about politics are supposed to do?
Obviously, making those connections can be done in ways that are crass and inappropriate. But so can a discussion about anything. You can say we should talk about something else out of respect for the victims and their families, but the idea that the families’ grief might be lessened one iota if we refrained from discussing gun laws for a week or two is beyond ridiculous.
So here goes. This horrifying event demonstrates, as though we needed any demonstration, how removed from reality so many gun advocates are. When they push laws to allow gun owners to take their weapons anywhere and everywhere, they often paint a picture of a nation of skilled crime-stoppers, ready at a moment’s notice to cut down that psychopath before he has a chance to draw his weapon. But this is an absurd fantasy. Colorado is a state with lots and lots of gun owners, and it has a concealed-carry law that allows you to get a permit without too much trouble. We don’t know if anyone else in the theater had a gun on them, but even if they had, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Lots of gun owners imagine themselves to be some kind of Jack Bauer figure, who will see an event play out in slow motion while he calmly draws his weapon and delivers one perfectly aimed shot to save all the civilians. But that’s not how things work in real life. A mass shooting like this one is chaos. Things don’t happen in slow motion, and a few hours at the shooting range don’t turn you into Jack Bauer.
I wish I could say “This would never have happened if we had passed Law X.” But extremist Republicans and cowardly Democrats have guaranteed that our nation is and will continue for the foreseeable future to be awash in guns, about one for every man, woman, and child in the country. They’re easy to get and easy to amass. And if you’re angry or mentally ill or plenty of both, you won’t have much trouble putting together the arsenal that will enable you to vent your rage in the most spectacular and destructive way imaginable.
Around 30,000 Americans are killed with guns every year (the figure includes murders, suicides, and accidental deaths). Our political system has, in its wisdom, decided that that’s an acceptable price to pay for the “freedom” that isn’t enjoyed by people in England or France or Japan, where this kind of mass shooting is unknown. When it happens here—as it did last year and the year before that, and as it will next year and the year after that—nobody should act surprised.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 20, 2012
“A Stacked Deck”: Rick Scott’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Task Force All Supported The Law
Gov. Rick Scott has created a task force to review the controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, the law behind which George Zimmerman hid after shooting and killing unarmed teen Trayvon Martin. He revealed the members of the task force on Thursday, and it should come as no surprise that among the four legislators appointed, two belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council and that all four voted for the law.
One of the members, in fact, is state Rep. Dennis Baxley, who authored the law and who has said it doesn’t need to be changed. Among others:
– Sen. David Simmons, R-Maitland, co-sponsored and voted for Stand Your Ground. He told the Herald/Times bureau that he was instrumental in drafting the final language of the law as House Judiciary Committee chairman, and was Baxley’s roommate at the time.
– Rep. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford, joined the Legislature in 2010, and the first bill he passed was a controversial gun rights bill banning doctors from asking patients about gun ownership.
– Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, voted for the bill in 2005. It passed the Senate unanimously.
Baxley and Brodeur belong to ALEC, and ALEC used Baxley’s language for the template for bills passed all over the country. The 17-member task force also includes legal professionals including state prosecutors, church leaders and neighborhood watch voluteers. It doesn’t include a number of Democratic lawmakers and opponents of the law who appear to have been shut out of the selection process. Think Progress describes the selection committee:
Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll, who is also heading the task force, was a co-sponsor of the House bill and voted for it in 2005. As did fellow selection committee members Senate President Mike Haridopolos and House Speak Dean Cannon. Incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford was not in the legislature in 2005 when the law was passed, but is currently listed as a member of ALEC.”
According to this report, Carroll says the Democratic lawmakers didn’t apply to be on the task force. The Democrats all say that there was no announcement of an application process, and that their efforts to be included in the task force were ignored. Most disturbing is the point raised by Rep. Dwight Bullard, D-Miami, who points out: “The governor failed to represent that diversity by neglecting to place a single South Florida lawmaker or mayor of a large city on the task force, in essence giving no voice to the regions of the state most often plagued by gun violence.”
Because of the lawmakers included in the group—those who would actually be responsible for making changes to the law—it seems to be stacked in favor of the law before it even gets off the ground.
By: Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, April 21, 2012
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