“Christie Vetoes Another Gun-Safety Measure”: It’s A Real Shame To See What Some Republicans Will Do In Advance Of A GOP Primary
In early 2013, not long after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) endorsed a series of gun reforms, including a ban on .50-cabliber weapons, saying there was no need for consumers to purchase these kinds of firearms. It was a sensible point – .50-cabliber weapons fire ammunition the size of carrots, have the capacity to pierce steel plate armor from several hundred yards away, and can even shoot down airplanes.
But when New Jersey’s Democratic legislature approved a ban on .50-cabliber weapons, Christie vetoed the bill. The pandering to the Republican Party’s far-right base had begun.
It’s an ongoing exercise.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a gun control bill on Wednesday that would have banned magazines with more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
The potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate called the restriction of the number of bullets “trivial,” and denied such a limit could prevent future mass shootings.
“Mass violence will not end by changing the number of bullets loaded into a gun,” Christie said in his veto message.
Well, no, of course not. But the point isn’t to end mass violence with one gun-safety reform; the point is to potentially reduce the number of casualties the next time a gunman goes on a rampage.
The governor must have some basic understanding of this, making his statement a classic example of willful ignorance.
I’ve never really understood why limits on high-capacity gun magazines are a problem for so many Republicans. These limits aren’t unconstitutional; they don’t affect hunters; and they don’t prevent Americans from buying firearms to protect themselves.
They might, however, help take the “mass” out of “mass shootings.” So what’s the problem? Other than the NRA telling Republicans that all reforms are bad reforms?
There’s some evidence that the shooter in Newtown paused to reload during the massacre. Nicole Hockley, whose six-year-old son Dylan was killed, said last year, “We have learned that in the time it took him to reload in one of the classrooms, 11 children were able to escape. We ask ourselves every day – every minute – if those magazines had held 10 rounds, forcing the shooter to reload at least six more times, would our children be alive today?”
It’s against this backdrop that Chris Christie vetoed a measure to limit magazine capacity, saying, “I will not support such a trivial approach to the sanctity of human life, because this is not governing.”
I haven’t the foggiest idea what that even means. What’s “trivial” about limiting magazine capacity in an attempt to save lives? If it’s “not governing,” what is it?
It’s a real shame to see what some Republicans have to do in advance of a GOP primary.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 3, 2014
“Why The NRA Is Staying Silent On Target’s Gun Bun”: Idea of Public Being Safer If People Don’t Walk Around With Guns Is Spreading
Last week the mega-chain Target joined Chipotle and Starbucks in making their stores places where customers have a good chance of getting gunned down. At least this is what the NRA believes will happen now that the company’s CEO announced that Target shoppers should leave their guns at home. Everyone remembers the NRA’s reaction after Sandy Hook — namely, that schools that were gun-free zones invited kooks like Adam Lanza to walk in and start blasting away. But the notion that public space is safer if people don’t walk around with guns seems to be spreading and it’s interesting that the NRA’s response so far to Target’s new policy has been no response at all.
The gun industry is not only encountering some push-back to its notion of guns as being the best way for citizens to protect themselves against crime; they can’t even get their facts straight about whether there’s any connection between gun ownership and criminal activity at all. The NSSF (the trade association for America’s firearms industry) just posted a video which announces that “gun crimes have fallen dramatically over the past 20 years,” except the graphic that accompanies this statement shows that the entire decline took place between 1993 and 2000, which was before Obama went into the White House and gun sales soared.
Despite what John Lott says, there’s no proof that higher levels of gun violence occur in gun-free zones. And the evidence that protecting yourself with a gun may actually be less safe than using other protective methods to thwart a criminal attack — yelling, punching, running away — comes from, of all people, a scholar named Gary Kleck who first “discovered” that arming ourselves made us better able to stop crime. Kleck published a study in 1995 which, based on answers collected from interviews with 213 respondents, claimed that people used guns to prevent more than 2 million crimes from being committed each year. But in 1994 he submitted a report to the Department of Justice in which he found that defensive methods other than guns actually resulted in fewer injuries from criminal attacks. He didn’t mention these findings when he began touting the benefits of armed resistance the following year.
And neither did the NRA. Ever since the mid-1990s the gun lobby has been tirelessly beating the drums for expanding concealed carry, as well as for diminishing the list of locations where guns cannot be found. Their latest victory was Georgia, where a new law took effect July 1 which expands the right to carry a gun in locations that serve alcohol, houses of worship and government facilities, as long as the owners of the affected properties don’t object.
The campaign to promote carrying guns in public places took a big step backwards, however, with the decision by Target to ask gun-toting shoppers to stay out of their stores. The announcement was worded in a way that did not absolutely ban concealed-carry in states which, unlike Georgia, don’t give property-owners the right to restrict the presence of guns. But when Target said that guns are at odds with the “family-friendly” atmosphere they try to maintain, they weren’t just sending a message to gun owners, they were sending a clear message to the gun lobby as well.
Despite twenty years of unending appeals to fears of crime and the utility of owning guns, the NRA and its allies have failed to convince a majority of Americans that walking into a public place with a gun in your pocket is the smart thing to do. What they have done is to provoke a grass-roots backlash organized and funded by a guy with lots of bucks whose efforts to get Americans behind the notion of less guns equals more safety may just begin to pay off.
By: Mike Weisser, The Huffington Post Blog, July 3, 2014
‘Looking Beyond The Store Countertop”: Maybe The Supreme Court Isn’t As Pro-Gun As We Thought
Bruce Abramski must have known he was going to get into trouble when he bought a Glock 19 for his uncle. A retired police officer, Abramski was familiar with gun regulation. Yet he accepted $400 from his uncle, went to a local gun store, and—as required to purchase the Glock—filled out federal Form 4473. Question 11.a of that form required Abramski to confirm that he was “the actual transferee/buyer of the firearm(s)?” Question 11.a includes, in stark bold lettering “You are not the actual buyer if you are acquiring the firearm(s) on behalf of another person. If you are not the actual buyer, the dealer cannot transfer the firearm(s) to you.” Nonetheless, Abramski signed the form, knowingly lying about his intentions in purchasing the gun for his uncle.
When he was finally caught, Abramski answered with the audacity increasingly typical among a certain class of gun owners: He insisted the law itself was illegal. His lying, he claimed, was perfectly lawful. Surprisingly, he almost convinced the Supreme Court to let him off. Instead, a narrow majority of the Court declined Abramski’s invitation to gut one of the nation’s most important laws designed to reduce easy access to guns by felons and the mentally ill. The ruling is a relief to law enforcement—and a setback for the National Rifle Association.
Law enforcement will be happy because the majority’s decision affirmed the continued viability of the federal prohibitions on gun trafficking. Nearly half of all trafficking investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the main federal agency overseeing gun sales, involve what Abramski did. It’s called “straw purchasing,” and it occurs when one person buys a gun for another person. People who can’t pass a background check, say, because of a prior felony conviction, persuade someone else to go to a gun store for them. It could be a girlfriend, a young recruit into the gang, or just someone looking to make a quick buck. Studies show that criminals often use straw purchasers to obtain firearms.
Abramski wasn’t planning to give his gun to a criminal. It was for his uncle, who wasn’t prohibited himself from purchasing firearms. In the lower courts, Abramski emphasized this argument. Because the uncle could have bought the Glock 19, Abramski’s misrepresentation on Form 4473 was not, as the law required, “material to the lawfulness of the sale.” This argument had a certain logic to it, even if it wasn’t especially persuasive in the end. The lie was still material because the gun store, which needs to verify the background of the buyer, would not have been allowed to sell the gun to Abramski had he told the truth. At the Supreme Court, however, Abramski decided to go further: He said he could lie regardless of his uncle’s eligibility. As is so often the case in today’s gun debate, a reasonable argument is pushed aside in favor of a more extreme and dangerous one.
Abramski’s extreme claim was that straw purchasing was not illegal at all. The law, he argued, only required the gun store to check his own background because he was the purchaser. It didn’t matter what he did with the gun later or whether he was already intending to sell it to his uncle, his aunt, or some dude he met at a gun show. As Justice Scalia, who agreed with this argument, wrote in dissent on behalf of Justices Alito, Thomas, and Chief Justice Roberts: “If I give my son $10 and tell him to pick up milk and eggs at the store, no English speaker would say that the store sells the milk and eggs to me.”
Writing for a majority that included Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, Justice Kagan declined to buy what Scalia and Abramski were selling. In holding that federal law intends to look beyond the store countertop (Abramski and the gun dealer) to see who the actual purchaser is (the uncle), Kagan was clearly worried about the AFT’s continued ability to prosecute gun trafficking. The “overarching reason” to reject Abramski’s circumscribed interpretation is that it “would undermine—indeed, for all important purposes, would virtually repeal—the gun law’s core provisions.”
Repealing gun control is exactly what the NRA, which filed a brief in support of Abramski, was hoping for. Although famous for saying we need to enforce existing gun laws, here at least the NRA was trying to make it harder to enforce federal law. Perhaps this is an example of what’s been called the NRA’s gun control “Catch-22”: make gun laws impossible to enforce, then point to the laws’ ineffectiveness as a reason to get rid of them. Had the NRA’s position won in the Court, tomorrow they’d be saying the background check law doesn’t work because it doesn’t stop straw purchasing.
Whatever the NRA’s motive, the nation’s leading gun rights organization will be disheartened by today’s ruling. It’s bad enough, from the NRA’s perspective, that the Court strengthened the hand of ATF—long the target of the NRA’s hostility. Worse, the Abramski case saw Justice Kennedy siding with the liberal wing of the Court to uphold a gun control law. Ever since the Supreme Court breathed new life into the Second Amendment in the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, another narrow, 5–4 decision, the NRA has been counting on Justice Kennedy to side with it in the NRA’s challenges to gun control.
Based on that expectation, the NRA has been pursuing lawsuits around the nation challenging a variety of gun control laws. The most significant of these are laws restricting who can carry guns in public. Just this term, the NRA and other gun rights advocates petitioned the Court to rule on that issue in several different cases. Although the Court has so far declined to hear any of those cases—and today’s case was not framed as a Second Amendment case—today’s ruling shows that Justice Kennedy is willing to support gun control. For people on either side of the gun debate, that may be the most important signal to come from the Court’s ruling.
By: Adam Winkler, Professor of Constitutional Law at The UCLA School of Law; The New Republic, June 6, 2014
“Punish Them At The Polls: President Barack Obama Is Right, We Should Be Ashamed Of Gun Violence
We should be ashamed of the shooting after shooting on our streets and in our schools. We should be ashamed that Congress sits on its hands and does nothing to curb the slaughter.
That was how President Barack Obama characterized the issue of gun violence in a discussion with Tumblr founder David Karp the other day, and the president got it exactly right.
Eighteen months ago, 20 children were murdered in a grade school in Connecticut — and nothing was done to expand background checks or limit weapons clips. Since then, there have been 74 shootings at schools — the latest this week in Oregon left two dead and one wounded — and still nothing is done. And that’s just schools; that doesn’t count the shootings in theaters, temples, churches and incidents such as the recent Las Vegas spree that left two police officers, a Walmart customer and the two shooters dead.
And now, with the defeat of the No. 2 Republican in the House, Eric Cantor, the chances of anything getting done are even slimmer. Cantor, a Virginia Republican, who some critics said was too soft on defending gun rights as well as immigration reform, lost in a stunning upset to a tea party candidate in a GOP primary Tuesday. His defeat likely will both embolden the tea party wing of the Republican Party and make any remaining establishment Republicans more cautious. That means little action on issues such as gun control and immigration reform.
“The country has to do some soul-searching on this. This is becoming the norm,” Obama said Tuesday. “Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced developed country on Earth that would put up with this.”
Yes, mental health is an issue related to violence, and we have to find better ways of dealing with it. But other countries have people with mental illnesses and don’t have shootings on this scale. As Obama said, “The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people.” Yet “we’re the only developed country” that repeatedly has such terrible acts. “There’s no place else like this,” the president said.
This does not mean the end of the Second Amendment. We can respect gun and hunter rights and still curb gun violence. Australia has done it. Other countries have done it.
It’s fear of the political clout of the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers that is the biggest factor in Congress’ failure to act. Obama also noted that although polls show that a majority of Americans support steps to control guns, they don’t feel passionately enough about it to punish lawmakers who disagree. “Until that happens, sadly, not that much is going to change.”
Obama called the failure to achieve reasonable gun restrictions the biggest frustration of his presidency. It should be the biggest frustration for all Americans. Voters need to not only support tighter gun control; they need to get angry with politicians who refuse to act. And then punish them at the polls.
By: Milwaukee Sun Journal, Opinion, June 12, 2014
“Paralyzed By A Crazed Gun Lobby”: Gun Advocacy Has Now Become Parody
When I was growing up in the Cold War era, teachers instructed their pupils in the fine art of ducking under the desk as a shield against a strike from an atom bomb. That was a futile exercise, of course: A desktop provides no protection from the powerful destructive capacity of a nuclear weapon.
But it allowed teachers and their charges to pretend to have a defense against a frightening communist enemy whose might nearly equaled our own. It created a psychological barrier against helplessness.
These days, teachers train to protect their students from armed madmen who shoot up schools. They are taught to recognize not just the sound of gunfire in the hallway but also to hear the bone-chilling thump of an empty clip hitting the floor. They learn to hide their students; they memorize escape routes; they practice throwing ordinary classroom tools, like staplers, at an armed assailant.
As schools search for solutions, a manufacturer’s spokesman said sales of a product called the “Bodyguard Blanket,” a bulletproof covering that might offer a bit of protection from a school shooter, have been surprisingly strong. Why wouldn’t it sell quickly? Since the December 2012 Newtown massacre, there has been, on average, a similar incident every five weeks, according to CNN.
However, there’s a huge difference between the dangerous enemy we confronted in my youth and the current menace: Average citizens could defeat the lunacy now threatening our children. We are not helpless. Instead, for reasons that I simply cannot fathom, we are paralyzed by a crazed gun lobby.
It’s difficult to adequately describe our sense of defeatism in the face of the firearms fanatics. We don’t fight back when they insist on laws allowing guns in schools, in bars, in churches. We throw up our hands when they resist background checks. We shrug when another child is gunned down at school.
Oh, polls show our support for common-sense measures that would curb the death rate. After Newtown — when 20 small children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School — 91 percent of Americans supported background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and private sales. Yet the Senate could not manage to pass a bill that closed the “gun show loophole.”
It’s unlikely that any of the senators who voted against the measure will be called to account in the only way that matters — with defeat. While 41 Republicans (and five Democrats) voted against the bill, the GOP is expected to gain seats in November’s elections. What kind of message does that send to the gun fanatics?
Meanwhile, the gun lobby’s favorite arguments for its positions have been, well, gunned down. Gun advocates claim that widespread firearms ownership by responsible law-abiding citizens would help to stop the carnage. They insist that a would-be school shooter, for example, would be killed before he could hurt anyone if only teachers were armed.
Experience shows it rarely works that way. Earlier this month, anti-government extremists, husband-and-wife team Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers in Las Vegas, ambushing the officers as they ate lunch. The couple then went to a nearby Walmart, where they encountered an armed citizen, Joseph Wilcox, who spotted Jerad and tried to stop him. Wilcox, too, was shot dead.
Facts, however, don’t faze the National Rifle Association and its allies, who have long since descended into a lunacy that rivals parody. Consider this: Recently, gun fetishists in Texas have begun demonstrating their support for “open carry” laws by carrying their heavy-duty weapons into restaurants. They’ve posted pictures of themselves with their assault-style weapons — civilian versions of rifles such as the AK-47 — strapped to their backs as stunned diners look on.
The NRA posted an opinion piece on its website discouraging those antics: “It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates,” the writer said. Guess what? Within a few days, a backlash ensued from the gun cult, and the NRA disowned the commentary.
This is Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole madness. What does it say about the rest of us that we allow it to rule?
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 14, 2014
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