“Too Complacent About American Bloodbaths”: Reasonable Laws Could Solve Shooting Rampages
Last week’s horror at the Washington Navy Yard barely interrupted the stale political chatter, the dueling poll-tested messages, the sensational reports on the latest celebrity divorce or stint in rehab. While the newest mass shooting did preoccupy reporters for a couple of days, its import — at least judged in headlines and cable hours — quickly faded.
It was just another day of horrifying gun violence in America. The public has grown inured to the death toll, complacent about the destruction. If 20 dead babies at Sandy Hook didn’t move us to act, well, what will? When will the United States recover from this insanity — this sense that we cannot or should not rein in guns?
The “rampage” shooting has become a feature of contemporary culture, a peculiarly American perversion. It occurs in a few other countries, but not with the frequency with which it strikes here. This sort of crime — this kind of atrocity — generally stars an angry and deranged man determined to take out his wrath on strangers before going out in a blaze of glory. And there has been a troubling uptick in bloodbaths like this over the last decade.
The gun lobby would no doubt point out that, overall, gun violence has declined over the last several years. That’s true. As crime of all kinds has decreased, so have murders and assaults with firearms. But the “rampage” mass shooting has become more deadly even as more routine gun violence, the sort associated with monetary gain or personal revenge, has decreased.
Earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service issued a report, “Public Mass Shootings in the United States,” that catalogued 78 mass shootings between 1983 and 2012. They accounted for 547 deaths and an additional 476 injuries. The Washington Post has pointed out that half of the deadliest of those — Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Binghamton, Fort Hood and the Navy Yard — have occurred since 2007.
Experts have begun to focus, appropriately, on missed signals about the mental state of accused shooter Aaron Alexis, who told Rhode Island police officers that he was hearing voices. Certainly, the United States needs to do much better in providing mental health care to every citizen who needs it.
But it would be much more practical to focus on reining in guns. As any therapist would tell you, it’s very difficult to predict which patients may turn to violence. Alexis reportedly saw doctors at the Veterans Administration, but he told them he didn’t present a danger to anyone.
Sensible firearms measures would fill in the gap that our mental health system can’t straddle. Such limits would curb the bloodshed without infringing on the rights of any citizen who wants to hunt wild game or defend his home. Shouldn’t it be at least as difficult to get a firearm as it is for me to get a prescription for a sinus infection?
Take the simple matter of a waiting period. Alexis apparently purchased his pump-action shotgun two days before the massacre. With a few more days, various law enforcement and military entities may have pieced together his arrests for firearms violations and a report of his auditory hallucinations, which was apparently forwarded to naval authorities.
Other sensible measures — including a ban on high-capacity magazines — might not have deterred Alexis, but they would have curbed the violence from other shootings. And they would not infringe on the rights of the average gun owner. The Second Amendment does not espouse unlimited freedom to own the most dangerous firearms on the market.
Is the mass shooter the biggest crime problem remaining in America? By no means. But gun deaths are still a huge public health concern.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. will see more deaths from firearms than from car accidents by 2015.
Since the 1960s, we’ve made a series of law and policy changes that have reduced the carnage on our highways. We’ve done the opposite with firearms as various states have approved laws allowing guns in bars, parks and even churches.
That’s a recipe for more bloody rampages.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, September 21, 2013
“How Many More Times?”: Probably Many, Many More In The Imaginary America Of Gun Nuts
As our understanding (if that word doesn’t overstate what we can ever comprehend of such events) of yesterday’s shootings at the Washington Navy Yard improves, we’re seeing a depressingly familiar picture: disturbed man with “anger issues” and “gun issues” gets hold of an assault rifle and kills a lot of innocent people.
At this point, it seems Aaron Alexis came onto the military facility with a shotgun and acquired the assault rifle by stealing it, perhaps after killing its licensed user. If we even begin to have a public discussion of the killings as another data point in favor of stronger gun regulation, the gun lobby will make that a big argument, along with D.C.’s almost uniquely strong gun laws and the availability of other culprits in the affair (e.g., lax security for, and excessive dependence on, defense contractors).
Since we’re talking about a military base, the gun lobby will not, at least, be able to use its favorite argument, that a more secure environment in which more people were heavily armed could have prevented the killings.
But before we even head down the trail of talking about gun laws, let’s just acknowledge that this isn’t a matter of convincing Americans we need tighter background checks for gun purchases. According to every imaginable poll, they’re already convinced. It just doesn’t translate into action, in part because the gun lobby and the Second Amendment absolutists have an iron grip on one our two major political parties, and in part because because their power is especially strong in rural areas where strategically situated Democratic representatives haven’t yet been hunted to extinction.
As WaPo editorialized yesterday:
Life does go on, through Columbine in 1999, through Virginia Tech in 2007, through Sandy Hook in 2012. Each atrocity provides a jolt to the nation and then recedes with little effect, until the next unimaginable event occurs, except each time a little more imaginable. Everything was supposed to change after a man with a semiautomatic weapon mowed down 20 elementary school children in their classrooms last December. But for the politicians, nothing changed. Now, another massacre, another roster of funerals. Again, again, again.
So long as a powerful minority of Americans think the individual right to bear arms–any arms–trumps every consideration of public policy, and is the Crown Jewel of the Bill of Rights, and is our bulwark against tyranny–it won’t much matter. Hundreds dead, thousands dead, tens of thousands dead–it’s all irrelevant to what is in effect a religious commitment to the almighty Second Amendment, a golden calf worshipped as the ultimate expression of an illusory personal independence and an imaginary America.
No, rational arguments and conventional politics may never prevail against people who will look you right in the eye and tell you they need to be heavily armed in case it becomes necessary in their view to overthrow the government and impose their will on you. The whole idea here is that their rights trump your arguments, your priorities, your votes, your democratic elections, your duly authorized representatives or law officers. That’s their understanding of a “constitutional” system, and of what makes America “exceptional.” Their guns are an ever-present reminder to the rest of us that we just don’t know what level of taxation or regulation, or which offense to “traditional” culture, will be the trigger for a “patriotic” resurrection. That, perhaps, will keep us in line.
So while it’s important to keep up the fight for sensible firearms laws, no one should be under the illusion that this or the next mass killing is going to make a difference.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 17, 2013
“Under The Dome Of The NRA”: Navy Yard Shooting, A Jarring Reminder Of America’s Gun Problem
At least thirteen people were killed at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, including a suspected gunman, in the latest iteration of a now-familiar US news event: a mass shooting that claims victims apparently at random.
As the streets of DC came to life Monday morning, reports emerged around 8:20 am that shots were fired at the naval facility on the city’s southeast waterfront, less than two miles from the US Capitol. It quickly became clear that multiple people had been shot during a rampage, and at a 2 pm news conference on the perimeter of the crime scene, police confirmed that twelve people lay dead inside. The number was later updated to thirteen.
During a press briefing at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center not long after the shootings, a spokeswoman speculated that “it had to be a semi-automatic [weapon],” based on witness descriptions of gunshots heard in “rapid succession.” Authorities later confirmed that indeed the suspected gunman had an assault rifle as well as a pistol.
Police identified the deceased suspected shooter as Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old man from Fort Worth, Texas, who reportedly worked at some point as a contractor for the Navy.
In the context of increasingly frequent mass shootings and a highly visible congressional debate on gun control, any further mass gun violence is sure to become a political issue—all the more so when it happens in Washington itself.
Had the scene outside the Navy Yard been in a movie about a fictional gun control debate, it probably would have been rejected as too didactic.
The Capitol dome was part of the nearby skyline as reporters, television cameras, scattered passerby and law enforcement officers converged on M Street Southeast at the western edge of the perimeter set up by police. To the east, all one could see was a small army of emergency responders in the street; the sidewalk-to-sidewalk flashing lights made individual vehicles almost indistinguishable. A US Park Police helicopter flew in tight circles extremely low overhead.
In isolation it was not that unusual of a sight in DC: it looked like perhaps one of the many motorcades that criss-cross the city from time to time. But people on the street were unusually quiet and unsettled, because of course there was no dark limousine nor group of dignitaries in the middle of the chaos but rather the scene of a grisly multiple murder.
Many of the reporters at the scene wore congressional press credentials and might have otherwise been covering a comparatively dry budget debate, but instead scoured around for witnesses to the shooting. Blocks away, Senate office buildings were placed on a two-hour lockdown, with staffers unable to exit or enter, and intimidating military-style vehicles surrounded the Capitol complex.
In that fictional movie, this is where a dysfunctional Congress finally springs into action and helps solve the problem. The very same staffers who worked behind the scenes to scuttle this year’s big gun control legislation, now trapped in their offices because a mass shooter might be on the loose, suddenly see the light and pull the Manchin-Toomey legislation out of their desk drawers.
But will that happen here? While it’s clearly very early on, and the gun control debate has taken some surprising turns in the past year, this scenario seems unlikely. Senator Manchin already told reporters Monday afternoon he still didn’t have the votes to get his gun control legislation passed; no previously opposed members suddenly announced a new position. Only hours before the shootings, members of Congress and gun control advocates were bemoaning a recent loss of momentum in Congress thanks to recall elections in Colorado that cost two longtime legislators their jobs because they supported tighter gun rules earlier this year.
Continued inaction seems likely because the gun control debate has never suffered for an absence of bloodshed. Manchin-Toomey didn’t fail because the slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School weren’t quite tragic enough. More indiscriminate killings—even right in the backyard of Congress—probably won’t change the fundamental calculus made by Senators to sidestep the wrath of the National Rifle Association (on display in Colorado just last week) and extremely pro-gun conservative voters, who value “gun rights” to the exclusion of almost any other issue.
That said, the gun control package was only a couple of votes short in the Senate this year. Maybe more shootings will finally convince someone to change his or her vote. But more likely, until the fundamentals of the debate change, this mass bloodshed will only serve as gruesome illustrations of a problem nobody in Washington can seem to solve—nor even meangingfully address.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, September 16, 2013
“Motivated Fanatics”: The Gun Control Debate And Our Civic Life
I Googled the phrase “stack them in the streets” because I was searching for a historical reference from 1968. I ended up stumbling on something else: an article from the far-right site MinutemanNews.com explaining what was really going on with the gun debate in Congress:
Once cowed at the thought of provoking Second Amendment supporters, leftists will soon attempt to ban ‘assault weapons’ (and much more) as legislation offered by Diane Feinstein makes its way to the Senate floor…. Maybe Democrats are confident that fallout from Sandy Hook will provide the floor votes necessary to disarm the American people. But if the left is willing to risk picking this fight with millions of American gun owners, it must also believe something far more important—that Americans who have spent years arming themselves against the ultimate expression of tyranny by their own government—the overthrow of the Second Amendment—will choose to not fight when the time finally comes.
It is illustrated with a Che-like logo of a machine gun’s silhouette and the legend “COME AND TAKE IT”—a slogan, which is crucial to know about if you want to understand the contemporary right, that I wrote about here.
And then, at MinutemenNews.com came the 420 comments:
“…we will run them like the british to the shores and they better hope theres a boat waiting for them to take there ass to Europe with rest of the sheeple. If not, the sharks are be eating good that week. They better hope we deside to show mercy long enuff for them to get on planes or ships to leave the usa….”
“thats right there could be a lot of dead LEFTIST!!”
“Stack them in the streets like cordwood. There’s no room for prisoners.”
“Take members of Congress prisoner and hold them hostage because it is reported that many Federal Depts have ordered millions of rounds of hollow points supposedly to hold off civil unrest and insurrection. How long does the left think these Federal employees will hold out if many members of Congress are held as hostages…”
“Not hostage—Citizen Arrest. Their vote will provide the wanted list and their confession.”
“HELL NO, GITMOIZE THEM!”
“Bad time to be a politician. Dibs on shooting/hanging the President.”
How relevant should this stuff be, you ask, to one’s ordinary political reflections and calculations? After all, how many people can possibly read MinutemenNews.com? Well, let’s investigate. Deploying the algorithm at Ranking.com (and allowing that there’s no easily settled way to measure traffic), I compared the traffic there to some of the sites I read and have written for. CoreyRobin.com, the blog of the Brooklyn College professor who is my favorite political writer, ranks 144,234. The website of Campaign for America’s Future, where I published in 2007 and 2008, is at 41,870. Three of my regular lefty reading stops, the blogs Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Americablog, and Crooks and Liars—where I contributed regularly last year—rank 41,346 and 11,301 and 9,897, respectively. The homes of my online columnizing in 2006-07 and 2012, TNR.com and RollingStone.com, clock in at 8,481 and 7,263. TheNation.com? We are at 9,088.
MinutemenNews is in the middle of that pack: 12,600.
It is a reasonable surmise, then, that the author of “The Left Is Convinced Americans Won’t Fight for Second Amendment Rights” has at least as many or possibly more readers than I do. And look here: as much as I hate to admit it, its readers race leagues ahead of the lefty blog pack when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is: knocking on doors in campaigns, stuffing envelopes—and, don’t forget, showing up at political meetings with guns. As my favorite blogger Digby always reminds us, pissing in the wind as far as I can tell, committing politics while armed is the ultimate act of civic intimidation. I find it very hard to argue that the implicit threat by these people to shoot politicians and officers of the law who cross them—or better yet, to “stack them like cordwood”—does not provide some sort of unmeasurable advantage in political conflicts.
Gun nuts are the most motivated people in our politics. And now we’ve had a natural experiment to prove it: the first recall election in Colorado history was lost by two state senators who had the temerity to vote for legislation requiring background checks for firearms purchases and banning ammunition magazines over fifteen rounds.
A site called PolticusUSA.com pronounced with bafflement: “Colorado Voters Support Background Checks Yet Still Recall Lawmakers for Background Checks.” It headlined a nice roundup of data from the election last Tuesday. Senate president John Morse went down 51 to 49 in conservative Colorado Springs, and the other senator, Angela Giron, went down 56-44 in blue-collar Pueblo, both “not districts that lean heavily Republican.” Statewide, a Public Policy Polling survey found the weekend before the balloting that Colorado voters favored background checks by 68 to 27 percent. They concluded that this means Democrats might face trouble in the next statewide election, but I thought that was a dense conclusion. It was the issue here that was the issue—the issue of “politicians taking away our guns.”
“Intensity of commitment” is a difficult problem for political theory to analyze: is it a violation of the public will when fanatics motivate themselves so much more efficiently than moderates? (“The definition of ‘moderate,’” I once read a Barry Goldwater supporter noting in 1964, “is ‘someone who doesn’t knock on doors on election day.”) Is it “undemocratic” when a measure overwhelmingly favored by “ordinary” voters is defeated by conspiracy theorists who fear that a baby step designed to keep guns out of the hands of psychotics and criminals is actually a giant leap toward New World Order government? Or is it the essence of democracy?
I wish I knew.
But that’s an intellectual problem. The political answer is obvious. Don’t mourn. Expose the fact that the National Rifle Association and its acolytes violate all the bounds of civility that make democratic deliberation possible (most people simply don’t know this: the PPP found that the same Coloradans who want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent also have a positive view of the NRA by a margin of 53 to 33 percent). Embarrass the pundits who refuse to recognize this. Tell the story that Digby’s been trying to tell: that guns at political events make democracy impossible. And don’t be moderate. Knock on doors on election day. Organize.
By: Rick Perlstein, The Nation, September 13, 2013
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