“Another Kid With An AR-15”: Yet, Washington Has Given Up On Gun Control And Doing Absolutely Nothing
The scene described by eyewitnesses and authorities is one out of a video game: Suspected shooter John Zawahri turned the beachfront Southern California community of Santa Monica into a battle zone for 15 minutes Friday afternoon, cutting a bloody swath through a mile of the city as he shoot at cars and passersby with abandon after killing two family members and burning down their house. NBC News:
As firefighters first arrived at the scene to extinguish the blaze, the gunman carjacked a vehicle being driven by an adult woman and threatened to murder her if she didn’t drive him to the nearby college campus, Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said Saturday.
The gunman demanded the woman stop at various points along the mile-long ride so he could fire indiscriminately at passing cars, police said. He shot at a woman driving past the scene of the carjacking, wounding her, and later sprayed bullets at a public bus, shattering glass and injuring three people.
As they approached the SMC campus, the shooter fired at Carlos Navarro Franco while he sat behind the wheel of his SUV, which spun out of control and careened into a wall…[he] died instantly.
And yet, the scene is all too quotidian and real. It follows a familiar script: A young man — Zawahri’s 24th birthday would have been on Saturday — who suffered from emotional and psychological problems — he was previously hospitalized for mental illness — wielding an AR-15 rifle — the same gun used at Sandy Hook and Aurora and Oregon and countless other shootings — to kill innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case, five dead, including the gunman, and at least four others injured.
The parallels with alleged Newtown shooter Adam Lanza go even deeper. Zawahri’s parents were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom neighbors desired as a “lovely woman…with a crazy kid.” “John had a fascination with guns,” a friend told the Los Angeles Times. “We were all worried about it.” And, like Lanza, he shot his parent before launching his rampage.
Maybe it’s because the shooting was overshadowed by blockbuster revelations about government spying, or maybe we’ve finally exhausted our ability to care about these tragedies after so many, but the shooting hasn’t earned anywhere near the attention of other mass sprees. Or maybe it’s just too difficult to dwell on — and no political leaders have an interest in drawing attention to it — since Washington has all but abandoned any attempt to reform gun safety laws.
And this case should show just how badly those laws need reform. Zawahri should have been stopped at least twice over from accumulating his stockpile, thanks to both his mental health problems and California laws that generally prohibit the purchase of assault weapons. Critics will undoubtably say the fact that he wasn’t stopped shows the opposite — strict gun laws don’t stop shootings — but both prohibitions are fraught with glaring loopholes, as this incident and too many others have shown. Guns can be lightly modified to flout legal definitions of assault weapons, or purchased online, or bought through private sales in other states to skirt all regulations. They can even be assembled from parts kits purchased online with zero government oversight, as Bryan Schatz did just a few miles from Santa Monica for a Mother Jones story.
But more importantly, background checks are supposed to stop people with mental illness from purchasing weapons, but problems with coordination between states and the FBI have meant that this often doesn’t happen. And it’s too easy to avoid a background check all together. These are exactly the kinds of loopholes that reforms want to close.
Others will say that armed bystanders could have stopped the shooting, but this argument fails basic tests of logic, history, and science. Armed civillians rarely, if ever, stop gunmen, and occasionally injure other victims in the melee by accident. And if guns laws are worthless because some people won’t follow them, as the NRA and its comrades like to say, then by that logic all laws, from speed limits to prohibitions on rape, should be thrown out because people keep finding ways to break those too.
Maybe guns don’t kill people, as the bumper sticker says, but tell me that Zawahri would have killed as many people with a knife instead of a semi-automatic assault rifle. And if it can happen in restorty Santa Monica, a community best known for being the backdrop for hundreds of movies and the subject of several hit songs (and, disclosure: this hometown of this writer), or white collar Newtown, Connecticut, it can happen anywhere.
We’ll probably never be able to stop all gun crimes, but throwing up our hands and doing nothing to at least try isn’t the answer.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 10, 2013
“A Predictable Ugly Side”: When The NRA Comes To Town
The National Rifle Association wrapped up its annual convention over the weekend, and much of the gathering went as expected. The NRA presented its familiar faces (Wayne LaPierre), its familiar villains (President Obama, Michael Bloomberg), it’s friends who are struggling to remain relevant (Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin), and a whole bunch of Republicans who are likely to run for president (Santorum, Perry, Walker, and Jindal).
Of course, it also presented a sadly predictable ugly side. One vendor at the convention, for example, sold “life-sized” torsos made to look like the president, which “bleed when you shoot them.” Asked if the Obama likeness was intentional, the vendor told BuzzFeed, “Let’s just say I gave my Republican father one for Christmas.”
Looking ahead, one of the more notable developments for the organization is the election of James Porter, an Alabama attorney, as the group’s new president. LaPierre may be the public face and CEO of the right-wing group, but David Keene, the former chairman of the American Conservative Union, has served as NRA president.
And Porter will make Keene look moderate by comparison.
As shown by his “culture war” comment Friday and others in his past, Porter’s style is likely to be one that fans the flames of an emotionally combustible debate.
Porter has called President Barack Obama a “fake president,” Attorney General Eric Holder “rabidly un-American” and the U.S. Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” On Friday, he repeated his call for training every U.S. citizen in the use of standard military firearms, to allow them to defend themselves against tyranny.
That last point is of particular interest. Our friends at “All In with Chris Hayes” aired a Porter clip on Friday’s show that stood out for me: “Our most greatest [sic] charges that we can have today is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so when they have to fight for their country, they are ready do it. Also, when they are ready to fight tyranny, they are ready to do it. Also, when they are ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and weapons to do it.”
Porter hasn’t specified who, exactly, the tyrants might be, but it sounds as if he wants American civilians to be trained to use military weapons in case they need to commit acts of violence against the United States.
Say hello to the new president of the NRA.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 6, 2013
“The Gun Lobby’s Dumbest Argument”: Embracing Their Moral Corruption By Mounting The Prevention Horse
As the Senate gets set to show that you can fight the National Rifle Association, let’s consider what has to be the worst reason ever put forward by anyone to oppose anything in the entire history of the human race: that the actions under consideration “won’t prevent” future tragedies or “wouldn’t have prevented” such-and-such sociopath from unloading hundreds of rounds into the bodies of children. Gun nuts invoke this argument as if it’s some kind of clincher, a discussion-ender. It’s anything but. It shows total ignorance about the reasons that we make laws in the first place. It demands that gun legislation meet a standard of performance that laws in no other arena of public policy are ever held to. It keeps gun-control forces constantly on the defensive because the people who cynically spout this nonsense in public know that many well-meaning but naive folks will buy it. It’s stupid, but for these reasons it is surely more evil than stupid, and it must be stopped.
Let’s take my objections one by one. Why do we make laws? Well, of course, there is an element of prevention in all policy-making. We passed clean-air and clean-water laws in the 1970s in no small part to try to prevent selfish corporations and others from befouling the air and water. But did anyone think that the passage of such laws would prevent all pollution? Despite the kind of palaver politicians unload on us when a major bill is passed, obviously no sentient person thought any such thing. People are people, some of them are chiselers and sociopaths, and if giving a few hundred poor children asthma is going to increase their bottom line by 1 percent, they’ll do it.
Still, we made the laws. Why? For two other reasons. One, to have a ready statutory means by which to punish the chiselers and sociopaths. And two, to make a statement as a society about what sort of society we are. As it happens, we passed the Clean Water Act of 1972 in part simply to say: whatever sort of society we are, we aren’t one in which we will watch as our rivers catch fire and not try to do anything about it.
We do try to do something about it. Yet even so, and here is my second point, no one thinks laws against pollution will prevent all pollution. Similarly, no one supposes that laws against armed robbery will prevent all armed robbery. No one expects that laws against tax evasion will stop the selfish and the stingy from hiring their selfish and stingy lawyers to identify for them various selfish and stingy new ways around the laws. We do not presume man’s perfectibility. And yet somehow, gun laws are supposed to meet the standard of being able to prevent all future massacres and are criticized as total failures if they don’t? Absurd.
This gets to point three, in which we reach the very heart of the gun lobby’s cynicism and grandiose moral corruption. Of course, it’s our desire that new laws might prevent tragedies. People don’t want to see another Newtown. Admittedly, gun-control advocates are guilty of speaking in these kinds of tropes. It’s a natural human urge among well-meaning people to want to prevent the deaths of children. But what the gun lobby does is that it takes this wholly decent desire and twists it into an excuse to permit the carnage to continue. Adam Lanza would have passed a background check, they say; therefore, make no changes in law. And sadly, many of those well-meaning people will buy this. It’s an argument that’s very hard for gun-control forces to win.
Well, maybe Lanza would have passed a check. But maybe some future Lanza will not. And in any case the problem is hardly that the changes the Senate might pass try to do too much. They do far too little. The fact that bans on extended magazines and unlimited purchases of ammunition aren’t even under serious consideration here is staggering and revolting. No sportsman or hunter needs 6,000 rounds of ammunition and high-capacity drum magazines (take a gander at these here yet that is exactly what Aurora killer James Holmes had.
And here is the final sick irony. Say Congress actually passes what’s under consideration. Then eight months from now there’s another mass shooting. See, the NRA will sneer? Didn’t prevent it. Yet it’s the NRA that works every day in Washington to make sure Congress can’t even consider things like magazine and ammunition bans that might be more effective. Imagine a doctor who gave a man with cancer a few antibiotics and then sneered, “See, told you; didn’t work.” This is what the NRA does.
It would be nice if we could pass laws that would prevent any massacre from happening again. But we can’t. And we shouldn’t even be having a debate on those phony and stacked terms. The debate we should be having, and that some are trying to have, goes: we’re sick and tired of burying these children and other innocent people, and we have to express our values as a society here, doing whatever we can hopefully to prevent future carnage, but even failing that, we need to give ourselves readier means to make sure future offenders—not just the butchers, but the people who illegally arm them—are prosecuted as fully as possible.
What people really mean when they mount the prevention horse is: do nothing. Oh, now they’ve come up with arm the teachers, but the NRA “plan” to do that is just an excuse so they had something to say after Newtown. In a way they, too, are expressing their values. But their values are that their virtually limitless conception of their “rights” is more important than all these dead bodies. They’ve merely figured out that the prevention canard is the least morally objectionable way for them to express that. The rest of us need to talk about how morally objectionable it is.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 12, 2013
“The World Today”: Martin Luther King And Today’s Gun Advocates
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated 45 years ago yesterday, and one of the interesting little sidelights to the debate over guns that you might not be aware of is that gun advocates claim King as one of their own. You see, King had armed guards protect his family, and at one point applied for a permit in Alabama to carry a concealed weapon himself. He was turned down, since in the Jim Crow days the state of Alabama wasn’t about to let black men carry guns.
You can find references to these facts on all kinds of pro-gun web sites, as nonsensical as it may seem. Gun advocates want to claim King as part of their cause, but also want to completely repudiate everything he believed about the power of nonviolence, which is kind of like Exxon saying John Muir would have favored drilling for oil in Yosemite because he sometimes rode in cars. The reason Martin Luther King sought armed protection was there were significant numbers of people who wanted to kill him, and eventually one of them succeeded. If you’re a target for assassination, you should go ahead and buy a gun. But most of us aren’t.
This gets back to the threatening world so many gun advocates believe they live in. As they tell it, every one of us needs an arsenal of handguns and shotguns and AR-15s, despite the risk they might pose to ourselves and our families, because the risk from outside is so much greater. The imagine themselves as vulnerable as a civil rights activist in the Deep South in 1968. And they also believe that the authorities that are charged with our protection are indifferent or even hostile to our safety. That was certainly the case with King and other civil rights activists in the South in the 1960s; they knew that the government and the police wouldn’t be there to protect them, and some might even participate in trying to harm them.
But guess what: that’s not the world we live in today. The idea that the government is going to come knocking down your door, and you need to be ready to engage in a firefight with the police when that happens, is as ludicrous as the idea that MLK would be an advocate for further proliferation of guns if he were alive today.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 5, 2013
“A Shrinking Minority”: Gun Lobby Defends Not The Constitution, But A Cynical Business Model
There’s a little known fact about guns in America, and it’s one that the firearms industry and its political allies don’t like to dwell on: The rate of gun ownership in America is declining.
This has been the case for decades. Rates peaked way back in the 1970s, the era of disco balls and bell bottoms. In 1977, 54 percent of American households reported owning guns. In 2010, the last time the General Social Survey data was compiled, the percentage had shrunk to 32.
The Violence Policy Center follows such data, as analyzed by the National Opinion Research Center. The center’s last report was “A Shrinking Minority: The Continuing Decline of Gun Ownership in America.”
The trend is expected to continue. It seems counter-intuitive, given all the recent headlines about people lining up at gun stores and given the stranglehold the gun lobby has on American politics. It raises all sorts of questions. Who owns guns, who doesn’t, and why? For the nation to handle its problems with gun violence effectively, we need to grasp the nitty-gritty realities of gun ownership.
First of all, whatever upticks have been observed in the purchases of guns and ammunition seems to reflect stockpiling by those who were already gun owners. Gun manufacturing increased dramatically between 2007 and 2011, from 3.7 million weapons to 6.1 million being produced. You have to wonder if owning guns, for those who still do, is a bit like buying cell phones. Once you’re hooked, only the newest killer version will do, prompting more frequent purchases.
Meanwhile, the declining overall trend in ownership rates is largely explained by the changing demographic composition of America.
Older white men, many of whom grew up with hunting as a part of their lifestyle, are in decline relative to other demographic groups. Younger people are more likely to play soccer than sit in a duck blind or deer stand.
More and more households are headed by single women, and they are far less likely to have guns than families with a father in the household. So the swelling ranks of single mothers, a topic of much hand-wringing in other regards, may actually help to reduce suicides and accidental gunshot injuries.
But what about all of those news stories of women flocking to shooting ranges, eagerly buying up pink-handled pistols and bedazzled accessories to hold extra clips? The rate of gun ownership among women peaked back in 1982 at about 14 percent. It fluctuates more for women than for other categories of people, but it was just under 10 percent in 2010.
What those news stories about female gun fascination reveal is not so much reality as a gun industry fairytale. It’s marketing. Gun manufacturers, the National Rifle Association, hunting organizations and shooting ranges want to drum up interest in guns that has been slipping away for decades.
It’s of a piece with the events known as “zombie shoots,” staged target practice encounters designed to lure in younger people who aren’t being taken hunting by their parents.
A declining proportion of the American public is getting involved in gun culture — that is, the gun industry’s customer base is not growing — and yet business is booming. This should lead us to an alarming conclusion. The marketing of more lethal forms of weaponry and ammunition is how the gun industry has decided to shore up profits. The fierce resistance to bans on assault weapons and large ammo clips, as well as to background checks and any other hurdle put in the way of those who want to arm themselves, is not about defending the Second Amendment. It is about defending a business model — a sick, cynical business model.
If this weren’t the case, the gun industry would be engaging with the general public in a more benign and constructive manner, committing itself to protecting us from the harm its products inflict. Instead, Americans have become fed up with its paranoia and its rank influence peddling. It has lost its credibility.
This much is clear. Gun ownership’s place in American culture is withering on its own. Industry and political efforts to resuscitate it need to be understood and, when appropriate, challenged in that context.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, February 26, 2013
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