“NRA Mad House Of Mirrors”: The Scandalous Dirty Laundry That Will Not Get Hung Out To Air
We live in a post 9/11 society that has harnessed an ability to employ every technological means along with unleashing legal restraints to fortify unparalleled security measures in our war for safety. Several wars and presidents later, and now with a new incursion into Syria, the cost and sacrifice for our security continues to spiral. Paranoia runs high. Police are militarized. Citizens are militarized strolling streets and store aisles “jewelried” by firearms strapped to their bodies as if in some futuristic apocalyptic movie. And then, despite all of this heightened security, some guy in daylight freely hops over the spiked White House iron gates, jogs across the lawn and enters the White House through an unlocked front door where he is finally tackled and apprehended. This is an unprecedented and historical event that has been made by the lowest form of the biggest security breach at the highest asset of our society. It is incredible and incredulous.
The media machine is chomping down on this as a secret service institutional dysfunction. There will be Congressional investigations, soul-searching, protocol reforms, sound bites, and political grandstanding, but the other equally scandalous dirty laundry part of this story will not get hung out to air. The NRA will see to it. Why was the obviously mentally unhinged perpetrator, a known-known to law enforcement, Omar J. Gonzales, 42, a two tour Iraq war veteran able to own a personal firearms arsenal, some of which he had loaded in his car parked near the White House. Luckily, he was not intent on using it on that day in that moment in that setting.
Our society is very sick but not yet sick enough of guns. Sick with a warped second amendment epidemic guided by the likes of the National Rifle Association under the leadership of Wayne Lepierre and Ted Nugent who want to hand out guns to everyone, even and especially to kids as if it was candy. This is like the old mantra of McDonald’s, “get a kid early and you have them for life.” Whereas it would be unfair to blame our gun sickness entirely on the NRA, it is this organization that stands front and center with the money, tactics, power, politicians in their pocket, and symbolism that could immediately change the destructive trajectory that our gun culture costs to human life, to our way of life, and to our desire to walk free and brave in our own play areas free from senseless slaughter. Recent F.B.I. reports confirm what many believe, there is a clear and significant rise in mass shootings in America. This despite every slickly packaged argument for more gun amusement the NRA makes behind their house of reality distorting mirrors in defense of and advocacy of more guns for everyone. America has a greater daily security threat from folks with guns than deranged terrorists abroad. In the convoluted world of NRA mirrors the lies and deception cloud over the ugly truth that our gun culture fosters the economic health of the “mourning-grieving industry.”
But rather than be a reasonable broker to balance rights with real safety, the NRA has been grossly negligent and hostile to even the slightest retreat from out of control gun promiscuity. After each high profile gun slaughter episode that causes a societal wink, nod, acknowledgement and obligatory notion that maybe now change can occur, the NRA goes into damage control mode by disappearing into silence, until the news cycle moves to the next big headline, then it emerges from their dark corridors of power and influence with some nutty pro gun candy coated taunt aimed to defuse reasonable dissent.
The latest episode that sparked this artist out of numbness and reached down into my second amendment mental abyss to pull me back into the light happened on August 25, 2014. A nine year old girl in Arizona lost control of her Uzi firearm and shot and killed her gun instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, at the Last Stop Shooting Range, also known as “Bullets and Burgers.” The little girl was learning to shoot an Uzi? When did this become part of the American gunscape? It truly was a “last stop” for the parties involved. How much more perverted can it get than changing behavior with a conditioned pairing of burgers, “kid candy,” with the danger of firing exotic, rare and powerful guns. Is this the McDonaldization of guns and is it really supposed to be amusement?
I am pleased that Mr. Vacca’s family is praying for her without contempt. But this little girl’s summer vacation became a needless life changing tragedy. Sadly and incredibly, she was of legal age in Arizona, set at eight to shoot this weapon. Mr. Vacca leaves behind a wife and four children. That makes five lives multiplied by two entire social circles devastated by this tragedy. For what? Ultimately this was ruled an”industrial accident.” Incredible! And the NRA after-the-dust-settled response, “kids just wanna have fun.” Incredulous!
There are thirty gun deaths a day in America. I ache when I consider how many lives have been lost and ruined over senseless perverted NRA interpretations to the right to keep and bear arms. I ache when I hear of little kids, mentally disturbed folks and veterans, and for each relative of perpetrators and victims that become part of the slaughter. I began to think about a mountain of shoes of the dead from gun violence and how that would compare to the scenes of shoes from victims of the Holocaust at the hands of Nazis. This reality motivated me to paint “NRA Mad House of Mirrors.” The only way out of this is to see through the NRA’s mirrors.
By: Allen Schmertzler, Political Artist Specializing in Figurative, Narrative and Caricatured Interpretations of Current Events; The Huffington Post Blog, September 26, 2014
“Arms Race On The Streets”: It’s Clear, Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong
To read a lot of the post-Ferguson discussion about the “militarization of the police,” you’d think the whole phenomenon was the product of the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security. But as Peter Mancuso argues convincingly at Ten Miles Square today, there’s another angle that libertarian folk like Rand Paul do not want to pursue: cops bulking up with military hardware as part of an arms race created by Second Amendment absolutism:
[The] larger story begins many years before our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It involves a tit-for-tat escalation of armaments between criminals, citizens, and police departments that has been egged on by America’s arms manufacturers and gun rights groups. That escalation has led to a breakdown of essential republican understandings among ordinary citizens and government officials alike, and it will continue even if Washington manages to turn off the spigot of surplus weaponry from the Pentagon. As a former Marine combatant, weapons instructor, and career law enforcement official, I am hardly gun-shy, but it’s clear to me that something has gone terribly wrong.
By the early 1980s, there was a growing perception among law enforcement officers and portions of the public that America’s police were being out-gunned in encounters with criminals…. [R]outine arrests for illegal gun possessions were increasingly turning up weapons more powerful than those carried by the officers making those arrests. As law enforcement officers, their families, and police unions began naturally voicing their concerns, the call became louder to increase police officers’ “firepower” (a military term). It was argued strenuously then that this would require replacing the highly reliable revolver, which had been carried by most departments for over a half-century, with a rapid fire, more powerful, semi-automatic side arm.
Of course, this call to increase police officer fire power was further exacerbated by the fact that state legislatures failed miserably in the face of the gun lobby to curb the sale of some of the most powerful and lethal firearms that posed threats to police officers across the country in the first place. As this dichotomy, of the availability of more powerful weapons in the face of police officer safety took hold weapons manufacturers finally broke through and hit real pay dirt. The true irony in all of this is that the huge fortunes realized by their marketing more powerful weapons to American law enforcement, was actually the result of them having already made a fortune selling these more powerful weapons, easily acquired by criminals, to the public to begin with.
It’s actually a bit worse than Mancuso suggests. The arms race between police departments and lawbreakers created an atmosphere of spectacularly lethal violence (even as violent crime rates actually went down) that made it easy for the gun lobby and its paymasters to argue that every single citizen needed to become his or her own police force, as heavily armed as the cops and robbers. “Army of One” indeed.
So we aren’t just witnessing the consequences of the “militarization of the police.” It’s the militarization of America, which happens when you deliberately destroy the state monopoly on means of lethal violence. But again, the Second Amendment fanatics of libertarianism, for whom the only violence worth deploring is state violence, just won’t go there.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 25, 2014
“Our Country Is Rapidly Becoming Militarized”: America Is Nervous; We Must Lay Down Our Arms
There are far too many loose guns floating around the United States of America. What are we doing? This is not the world our forefathers conceived when they wrote the Second Amendment. Violence begets violence, and with no reasonable measures for arms control — our country is rapidly becoming militarized. The police are reacting to threats. Every angry or troubled soul could be carrying a concealed weapon and usually is. Yeah, yeah, yeah we have the right to bear arms ala the Second Amendment, but that was signed into law way before assault rifles were even a glimmer on the horizon. We are at an impasse in our country, society and culture, and must find a way to resolution.
Indeed guns are part of large sectors of our country often passed down through the generations – father to son. But it seems that our reality has changed. Too many novices are running wild and getting access to high powered weaponry. Last week, another young, white, mentally impaired woman was killed by the police right in San Jose, California. The weapon she was brandishing turned out to have been a power drill that had been painted to look like an assault weapon. Maybe, if the culture wasn’t running wild with illegal guns, the murder rate and gang activity so high in this locale — the police would have reacted differently. Yikes we sure don’t know and thank goodness don’t have to make those decisions every day.
Look the economy is still in the toilet for many Americans. Times are tough and income inequality still prevails. Funds have been cut from mental health services in many states, and unfortunately many are going untreated – proverbially falling through the cracks. Americans are nervous in this world of troubles. What’s going to happen to them? Is the US going back to war? And if so where – Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, or even Russia? Will folks be able to afford gasoline if this happens? Why are hybrids so expensive? Is the next airplane going to fall from the sky and where? What does it take to stay safe and keep your family safe? Sadly, this is the environment that allows racism and prejudice to fester and get a toe hold to dig in. Certainly, we know that we have got tough choices coming down the road. Turning the police into soldiers is not the answer as evidenced in Ferguson, Missouri; nor is denying generational family traditions. But maybe there’s just an opening big enough to consider enacting the simplest of laws that control the supply chain of weapons in this country. You know, we lived through Prohibition, and now track liquor and its sale. Marijuana is leaning toward legalization around the country. Can’t we step back from the random acts of violence in our streets, towns and cities? This might be the time to take action on gun control safety, and really turn a search light on what’s become of our public safety officers. We have to do better than this.
By: Michelle Kraus, The Hufington Post Blog, August 18, 2014
“Our Blind Spot About Guns”: Politicians Should Be As Rational About Guns As They Are About Motor Vehicles
If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.
Instead, we’ve reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent — not by confiscating cars, but by regulating them and their drivers sensibly.
We could have said, “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” and there would have been an element of truth to that. Many accidents are a result of alcohol consumption, speeding, road rage or driver distraction. Or we could have said, “It’s pointless because even if you regulate cars, then people will just run each other down with bicycles,” and that, too, would have been partly true.
Yet, instead, we built a system that protects us from ourselves. This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of what we should do with guns in America.
Whenever I write about the need for sensible regulation of guns, some readers jeer: Cars kill people, too, so why not ban cars? Why are you so hypocritical as to try to take away guns from law-abiding people when you don’t seize cars?
That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.
One constraint, the argument goes, is the Second Amendment. Yet the paradox is that a bit more than a century ago, there was no universally recognized individual right to bear arms in the United States, but there was widely believed to be a “right to travel” that allowed people to drive cars without regulation.
A court struck down an early attempt to require driver’s licenses, and initial attempts to set speed limits or register vehicles were met with resistance and ridicule. When authorities in New York City sought in 1899 to ban horseless carriages in the parks, the idea was lambasted in The New York Times as “devoid of merit” and “impossible to maintain.”
Yet, over time, it became increasingly obvious that cars were killing and maiming people, as well as scaring horses and causing accidents. As a distinguished former congressman, Robert Cousins, put it in 1910: “Pedestrians are menaced every minute of the days and nights by a wanton recklessness of speed, crippling and killing people at a rate that is appalling.”
Courts and editorial writers alike saw the carnage and agreed that something must be done. By the 1920s, courts routinely accepted driver’s license requirements, car registration and other safety measures.
That continued in recent decades with requirements of seatbelts and air bags, padded dashboards and better bumpers. We cracked down on drunken drivers and instituted graduated licensing for young people, while also improving road engineering to reduce accidents. The upshot is that there is now just over 1 car fatality per 100 million miles driven.
Yet as we’ve learned to treat cars intelligently, we’ve gone in the opposite direction with guns. In his terrific new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, notes that “gun control laws were ubiquitous” in the 19th century. Visitors to Wichita, Kan., for example, were required to check their revolvers at police headquarters.
And Dodge City, symbol of the Wild West? A photo shows a sign on the main street in 1879 warning: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.”
The National Rifle Association supported reasonable gun control for most of its history and didn’t even oppose the landmark Gun Control Act of 1968. But, since then, most attempts at safety regulation have stalled or gone backward, and that makes the example of cars instructive.
“We didn’t ban cars, or send black helicopters to confiscate them,” notes Waldman. “We made cars safer: air bags, seatbelts, increasing the drinking age, lowering the speed limit. There are similar technological and behavioral fixes that can ease the toll of gun violence, from expanded background checks to trigger locks to smart guns that recognize a thumbprint, just like my iPhone does.”
Some of these should be doable. A Quinnipiac poll this month found 92 percent support for background checks for all gun buyers.
These steps won’t eliminate gun deaths any more than seatbelts eliminate auto deaths. But if a combination of measures could reduce the toll by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved every year.
A century ago, we reacted to deaths and injuries from unregulated vehicles by imposing sensible safety measures that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Why can’t we ask politicians to be just as rational about guns?
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 1, 2014
“Turn The NRA’s Weapon Against It”: Gun Lobbyist, “I Have Never Believed In The General Practice Of Carrying Weapons”
In 1934, the National Rifle Association’s lobbyist testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” the lobbyist said. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
The NRA testified, under oath, in favor of the nation’s first federal gun control bill.
Eighty years later, the organization believes not only in “the general practice of carrying weapons” but also, as Ronald Reagan once wrote, that the Second Amendment “appears to leave little if any leeway for the gun control advocate.”
The NRA’s dramatic turnabout, and its decades-long campaign to change American hearts, minds and gun laws, is the subject of Michael Waldman’s compelling new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography”. Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at the New York University School of Law, explains that the authors of the Second Amendment never intended to create an “unregulated individual right to a gun” and explores why, today, we think they did. Published three days before the rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that killed six and wounded 13, the book shows how we got to this moment of routine gun violence — and offers a way out.
The Founders, it turns out, didn’t spend a lot of time discussing the Second Amendment. Skeptical of standing armies, their interest was in protecting “well-regulated” state militias; the phrase “keep and bear arms” was, at the time, a military reference. Scour James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, the states’ ratification debates and the markup of the Bill of Rights in the House of Representatives, as Waldman did, and, “with a few scattered exceptions,” you won’t find “a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation.”
Thus, for two centuries, the mainstream understanding of the Second Amendment was that it had to do not with an individual’s unregulated right to a gun but rather with the citizen-soldiers who would comprise a militia. There were plenty of guns in the United States, but those were subjected to restrictions that were widely accepted as both reasonable and essential.
Then, at the NRA’s 1977 national convention, gun advocates staged what came to be known as the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” replacing the group’s leadership with ideological extremists intent on building a political movement to fight even modest gun regulations and promote their revisionist view of the Second Amendment.
NRA-backed lawyers quietly and consistently churned out law review articles and pseudo-scholarship questioning 200 years of legal understanding. They shamelessly built up a self-referential body of work riddled with historical errors. Over time, these “scholars” toiling at the fringe were joined by a few leading academics, who lent some measure of respectability to this interpretation.
The gun lobby also engaged in a concerted public campaign, not to mention political manipulation. It was so successful that by the time the issue reached the Supreme Court in 2008, “the desired new doctrine fell like a ripe apple from the tree.” In its rotten 5 to 4 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, the majority ruled for the first time ever that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a gun.
The crucial lesson is that the gun lobby’s triumph was not judge-driven; it was judge-ratified. For all of the legitimate frustration with the court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, the real obstacle to sensible gun control is not judicial inflexibility but a lack of political courage. What we need is a sustained, multi-pronged effort to reframe the public debate and pressure our elected leaders into action.
The right’s long, assiduous and destructive march through the courts and the court of public opinion has, perversely, illuminated a path forward for their opponents. Constitutional change happens not by judicial fiat but through a broader dialogue with the other branches of government and, most important, with the people they represent.
That’s why we don’t necessarily need to revise the syntactic mess that is the Second Amendment, as former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens proposed. Cass Sunstein and others have pointed out that “the Court’s rulings continue to leave flexibility to state and federal governments.” Indeed, since the Heller decision, the courts have upheld many gun regulations.
Americans clearly support common-sense regulations; 90 percent support background checks for gun ownership. But because that support hasn’t translated into political action, 90 percent of Senate Republicans opposed a bill to expand background checks. The pleas of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shot by a madman at a congressional event in 2011, and the grieving parents of 20 schoolchildren slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., could not pry their votes, or their consciences, from the NRA’s cold hands. What we need is a movement of everyday Americans who believe in sane gun laws to stand up with the most vocal advocates at the forefront and replicate the passion and intensity of NRA activists.
The NRA demonstrated the power of a long, full jurisprudential campaign. It’s time to use their own weapon against them.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 3, 2014
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