“What An Honor”: What Do I Have To Do To Make The NRA’s ‘Enemies List’?
I can’t tell you how let down I am that I didn’t make the National Rifle Association’s so-called “enemies list,” which has surfaced again as the gun lobby comes under closer fire, if you’ll excuse the expression.
The NRA keeps so many scores of groups in its sights as anti-gun-control that it beggars belief. Among them are the American Academy of Pediatrics, the United Methodist Church, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the YWCA, and Physicians for Social Responsibility. Those from the creative arts named include Bruce Springsteen, Alec Baldwin, Jerry Seinfeld, Matt Damon, Kyra Sedgwick, and Maya Angelou, to name but a few.
What an honor. Some newspaper columnists, notably E.J. Dionne, Jr., and Cynthia Tucker, got the nod. Congratulations to all, but count me in for next time. Another columnist, the economist Paul Krugman, who writes for the New York Times, is also mysteriously missing. He recently described the NRA as “insane,” in the wake and ashes of the Newtown school shooting tragedy.
Well, I go farther than that. The NRA may as well be criminally insane for the part it plays in American society, terrorizing legislators like a loose junkyard dog. It has intervened to block medical treatment and lawsuits relating to gun ownership and violence. Deaf to the urgent words of wounded former representative Gabrielle Giffords, whose congressional career was cut short by a lone white young gunman, the NRA was unmoved by the cold blooded murder of women and children in Newtown by a lone white young gunman. For its aggressive stance over the last decades, NRA has the blood of children on its hands.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, didn’t bat an eye in front of a Senate panel where Giffords and Newtown parents made eloquent pleas for better gun laws, such as background checks for buyers. LaPierre didn’t move an inch on working with Congress on an assault weapons ban. And there was no apology to President Obama for the ludicrous, lowdown ad suggesting that his daughters’ school, Sidwell Friends, has armed guards (“his kids are protected by armed guards at their school”). Of course the Secret Service protects every president’s family, but the daughters’ school does not have armed guards. (Note to LaPierre’s outfit: Society of Friends schools are Quaker, a pacifist faith founded in 17th century England. “Pacifist” is a word NRA leaders should go look up in the dictionary.)
Assault weapons are more sacred than preventing human tragedy, both civilian and police deaths. It’s just that simple in the NRA’s sinister worldview. Obama could not have done anything better with his Monday than visiting Minneapolis to talk to citizens about stemming the tide of gun deaths. He stated he didn’t intend to wait for another Newtown in taking this fight to the people. Thank you, Mr. President, for acting like one.
One more thing: Gayle Trotter, a senior fellow at the NRA-allied Independent Women’s Forum, also testified in front of the same Senate panel as LaPierre last week. How she could make the absurd claim that mothers need to protect their children from intruders with guns is beyond the reach of reason. It is pure right-wing fiction, since studies show that women are actually less safe with a gun in the house. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island tried to set the record straight with some facts, but Trotter wasn’t having any of that.
Trotter’s testimony goes to show that the enemies of a more peaceful public square remain ruthless. We more temperate Americans can’t let them take Thomas Jefferson or James Madison away from us. We have to work harder to oppose their locked-in conviction, knowing that it won’t be perfect or pretty (to paraphrase Baltimore Ravens champion Head Coach John Harbaugh). But we have to get on the field and engage. Obama has started the dialogue out in the open where it belongs.
My mother, a professor, made the Nixon enemies list. Do you think I just made the NRA’s?
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and Eorld Report, February 5, 2013
“The NRA’s Tone-Deaf Rhetoric”: Powerful But Not Omnipotent, The NRA Is Seriously Overplaying Its Hand
The moment that most deserves to be remembered from Sunday’s thrilling Super Bowl came before the game, when Jennifer Hudson joined students from Sandy Hook Elementary School in singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a heart-rending elegy for the fallen — and a stirring call to action.
The brave students, in khakis and white polo shirts, survived the unspeakable massacre in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 of their schoolmates dead, riddled with bullets from an assault rifle fired by a madman. Hudson, the acclaimed recording artist and Oscar-winning actress, lost her mother, brother and nephew to Chicago’s endemic gun violence in 2008 when a troubled relative went on a murderous rampage; she had to identify all three bodies at the morgue.
The performance brought tears to the eyes of some of the players — and, surely, many television viewers. It was a reminder that life goes on but also that we must not lose sight of unfinished business: reducing the awful toll that barely regulated, insufficiently monitored commerce in powerful weapons takes on innocent victims, day after day after day.
Despite the best efforts of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and like-minded groups to make sure this business remains unfinished, reducing gun violence remains stubbornly high on the nation’s agenda.
This is partly due to the ravings of Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president and spokesman, who almost single-handedly, or single-mouthedly, is making the pro-gun argument sound even crazier and more irresponsible than it is. And that’s saying something.
This weekend, LaPierre treated viewers of “Fox News Sunday” to some of his lunacy. Anchor Chris Wallace gave him the opportunity to disavow the NRA’s shameful ad accusing President Obama of hypocrisy for supporting gun control while his own family is protected by armed Secret Service agents. LaPierre stuck to his guns, such as they were.
The president’s daughters “face a threat that most children do not face,” Wallace pointed out.
“Tell that to people in Newtown,” LaPierre replied. He was about to continue in this vein before Wallace interrupted: “Do you really think the president’s children are the same kind of target as every school child in America? That’s ridiculous and you know it, sir.”
LaPierre then went into an absurdist rant about how “all the elites and all the powerful and privileged, the titans of industry,” have armed security and — in LaPierre’s fantasy — send their children to schools that are veritable bunkers. Wallace noted that he sent his children to the same school the Obama daughters attend, and there were no armed guards on campus.
“The idea of an elite class,” Wallace said, “it’s just nonsense, sir.”
When Obama unveiled his far-reaching proposals on gun violence, it appeared initially that the NRA was willing to compromise. NRA President David Keene seemed to indicate that the organization would accept universal background checks for gun purchases while strongly opposing proposed bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. But LaPierre declared Sunday that that the NRA will resist any new legislation.
In Senate hearings last week, LaPierre portrayed life in the United States as one long horror movie. “What people all over the country fear today is being abandoned by their government,” he said. “If a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits, if a riot occurs, that they’re going to be out there alone, and the only way they’re going to protect themselves, in the cold, in the dark, when they’re vulnerable, is with a firearm.”
He left out the zombies.
With so many members of Congress already bought and paid for, it’s understandable that the NRA would feel a measure of confidence. But I believe the pro-gun lobby is seriously overplaying its hand, and that the wind has shifted.
Former representative Gabrielle Giffords also testified at last week’s hearings; she spoke only briefly, because it is still difficult for her to form words after being shot in the head two years ago. The gunman was wielding a semiautomatic pistol with a 33-round magazine. No one can convince her that if we lived in the world the NRA would like to see — in which everyone is armed to the teeth with military-style guns and ammo — we would be safer. Nor can anyone convince the children of Newtown. Or Jennifer Hudson’s family.
The NRA is powerful but not omnipotent. Polls show that Americans favor sensible gun control; if Obama and other proponents of sanity keep the issue alive, we can achieve it. From sea to shining sea.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 5, 2013
“Substance Over Style”: New Term, New Truthers, Same President Obama
If I had to pick my favorite political ad of the last few years, a strong contender would be the one from 2010 Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, in which she looked into the camera and said sweetly, “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you.” The combination of a hilarious lack of subtlety with a kind of sad earnestness made it unforgettable. And it’s the message that almost every politician tries to offer at one point or another (the “I’m you” part, not the part about not being a witch). They all want us to think they’re us, or at least enough like us for us to trust them.
So when the White House released a photo over the weekend of President Obama shooting skeet, the smoke of freedom issuing forth from the barrel of his gun, you could almost hear him saying, “I’m not an effete socialist gun-hater. I’m you.” If “you” happen to be one of the minority of Americans who own guns, that is. Even at this late date, Obama and his aides can’t resist the urge, when confronted with a controversial policy debate, to send the message of cultural affinity to the people who—let’s be honest—he is most unlike.
We should give the White House some credit, though. This came about because in an interview with The New Republic, Obama was asked whether he had ever fired a gun, and he responded that he shoots skeet “all the time” at Camp David, prompting conservatives to begin demanding photographic evidence. His aides knew that a photo of Obama shooting skeet wasn’t going to convince anybody of anything, and in fact would just spur the President’s most deranged opponents to make fools of themselves. Which is why White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer tweeted the photo “For all the ‘skeeters,'” and senior advisor David Plouffe did the same, writing, “Attn skeet birthers. Make our day – let the photoshop conspiracies begin!” Lo and behold, a bevy of conservatives obliged with fine-grained analyses of why the photo was faked or staged, making it clear that their opposition to President Obama is rational and policy-based, and they are absolutely not a bunch of crazy people.
And to Obama’s credit, in the interview that started the discussion about skeet shooting, he displayed what we actually ought to seek from politicians: an effort to understand people’s differing perspectives and the things that are important to them. “Part of being able to move this forward is understanding the reality of guns in urban areas are very different from the realities of guns in rural areas,” he said. “And if you grew up and your dad gave you a hunting rifle when you were ten, and you went out and spent the day with him and your uncles, and that became part of your family’s traditions, you can see why you’d be pretty protective of that.”
That’s true, and the gun owners Obama is referring to are, according to opinion polls, supportive of the kinds of measures he’s proposing, like universal background checks and limits on certain military-style guns and large-capacity ammunition clips. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the controversy from the 2008 campaign, when Obama was recorded saying people in small towns “cling to guns or religion” (you may have forgotten it, but people on the right haven’t, I assure you). A supporter had asked him how to convince people in economically depressed small towns in places like Pennsylvania who are hostile toward Democrats to change their minds, and his answer was actually an attempt to explain to the questioner where those people might be coming from. What he was saying was that they felt let down by politicians who promised them again and again that they could improve their economic circumstances, and so they turned to cultural issues—and more particularly, resentments—to define their political identity and determine their votes. He ended by saying that even if you can’t convince very many of them, it’s important to try. It may have been phrased inartfully (to use Mitt Romney’s formulation), but it was an attempt to understand and bridge personal divides, even if it became exactly the opposite. He couldn’t say “I’m you” to those small-town white voters, but he was trying to say, “I get you.”
Let’s not forget too that part of what made Barack Obama so much more appealing than the average Democratic candidate to so many liberals in 2008 is that, in fact, he is them. Multi-racial, hailing from a big city, educated, sophisticated and urbane, Obama looked to many liberals like the kind of person they might encounter in their daily lives, maybe even the kind of person they imagine themselves to be. Much as liberals have derided the efforts of politicians from both parties to create cultural affinity—from George W. Bush, son of Kennebunkport, pretending to be a down-home reg’lar fella, to John Kerry, well, hunting—their cultural connection with Obama was thrilling to them. But liberals don’t get that same thrill from him anymore, for the simple reason that he’s been president for four years, and those feelings of affinity from 2008 have been overwhelmed by the feelings they have about everything that has happened since, both good and bad.
And that’s true of the rest of the country too. Americans may not follow politics very closely, and they may not know very much about policy, but in 2013, if there’s one thing they have a pretty good idea about, it’s their feelings on one Barack Hussein Obama. After a first term full of consequential policy changes and significant real-world developments, substance has inevitably become far more important than style. The ones who find him alien and threatening wouldn’t have their minds changed by a thousand photos, no matter what they seemed to communicate. Obama surely knows that. But maybe someday, a Republican candidate will stage a photo-op to convince voters that despite all appearances, he’s just like college professors or Brooklyn hipsters. Instead of the “heartland” voters being pandered to, it’ll be the coastal urban dwellers. “I’m you,” he’ll say. And just as they do now, voters will respond, “Yeah, right.”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 4, 2013
“Too Few Deaths”: The Big NRA Flip-Flop On Background Checks
You know, I had premonitions of this story, thinking: Didn’t the NRA used to support universal background checks as the alternative to every gun control measure? Between deadline pressures and the fear that I was having a senior moment, I didn’t follow it up. But now, via TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro, we have a former NRA president acknowledging that used to be the organization’s position not that very long ago, but has “changed its mind”:
The former president of the National Rifle Association told CNN Thursday night that the group has changed its mind on universal background checks. Back in 1999, after the Columbine school shooting, the NRA actually ran ads saying “it’s reasonable to provide for instant background checks at gun shows, just like gun stores and pawn shops.”
After last month’s school massacre in Newtown, Conn., the group has sounded a different note. Universal background checks are a waste of time at best and a “federal nightmare” that would lead to confiscation at worst, NRA leaders have said recently.
On CNN, former NRA President Sandy Froman admitted that the group dramatically changed its tune on universal background checks — which gun control advocates have said are their number one post-Newtown goal — and explained the reason was that the NRA now sees expanded background checks as totally ineffective.
“Yes, the NRA has changed its position,” Froman said. “And the reason it’s changed its position is because the system doesn’t work. The (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) is not working now. We have to get that working before we can add any more checks to that system. It’s already overburdened. In Colorado, I know it takes 10 — 10 days to do an instant check.”
So why not fix the system? If the NRA’s basic position is its members are law-abiding citizens who have no reason to fear background checks, why is it a problem?
Current NRA President David Keene echoed those concerns at a meeting with reporters Thursday while explaining his group’s opposition to expanded background checks. But he also sounded a more ominous note, warning that a universal background check infrastructure was possibly a first step toward a dismantling of Second Amendment rights.
“One of the reasons we’re fearful of a system like that is because we have been and continue to be and will continue to be very opposed to any kind of national gun registry system,” Keene told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor-sponsored breakfast. “For several reasons. The historic reason of course is that is a precursor in many cases to confiscation.”
So boil off the evasions, and we’re right back to the insane idea that Barack Obama is part of, a front for, or a precursor to, a totalitarian regime, and that “patriots” need the right to keep their military-style weapons on hand in case the day arrives when it’s time to start killing cops and members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Somebody with access to these people needs to very directly ask them their own personal indicators for when it’s time to start the blood-letting.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 1, 2013
“From Silly To Ridiculous”: How To Ignore A National Consensus On Gun Violence
There are some fairly dramatic divisions among Americans on the major issues of the day, so when more than 90% of the country supports a proposal, it’s tempting to think policymakers would take notice.
Take universal background checks for gun purchases, for example. A CBS News poll found 92% of Americans support the idea. A CNN poll found 97% of American women favor the proposal. This week, Quinnipiac polled voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and found between 92% and 95% backing for expanded background checks and requiring checks on people buying firearms at gun shows. Hell, before the NRA went berserk, even it supported a system of universal background checks.
This is about as close as we get in this country to a national consensus. And yet, the idea still faces stiff resistance from the usual suspects.
Pursuing even the most popular of measures to curb gun violence would be a step toward destroying Americans’ liberty, Sen. Orrin Hatch argued Thursday.
[For Hatch, this] is a move toward tyranny.
“That’s the way reductions in liberty occur,” Hatch told reporters outside the Senate chamber. “When you start saying people all have to sign up for something, and they have a database where they know exactly who’s who, and where government can persecute people because of the database, that alarms a lot of people in our country, and it flies in the face of liberty.”
Yes, for the senior senator from Utah, background checks could, in his mind, be used as part of a nefarious scheme by the government to persecute citizens. Of course, but Hatch’s logic, the United States should not only leave the gun-show loophole intact, it should also eliminate the existing background-check system altogether.
Hatch isn’t the only one.
Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sounded very skeptical about the idea because it might interfere with “private sales on Sunday between relatives.” This comes a week after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the gun-show loophole” doesn’t exist, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office said the idea is a “thinly-veiled national gun registration scheme” intended to “ensure federal government minders gain every bureaucratic tool they need for full-scale confiscation.”
And when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) was asked whether he could envision supporting the universal background checks bill, he responded, “You know, I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”
It’s worth emphasizing that there appears to be some divisions among Republicans on the policy, with some prominent GOP policymakers saying publicly that they’re open to the idea and may end up supporting it. But in the face of overwhelming public sentiment, plenty of Republicans have few qualms about rejecting reform, for reasons that range from silly to ridiculous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 1, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 