“Reasonable Expectations”: Why The NRA’s Best Argument Is Still Bunk
Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association was back in the spotlight on Wednesday—this time to appear before a congressional committee contemplating new gun violence legislation. And while LaPierre got emotional at a few points, he spent most of his testimony trying to make a pragmatic argument: “We need to be honest about what works and what does not work,” LaPierre said, in a prepared statement. “Proposals that would only serve to burden the law-abiding have failed in the past and will fail in the future.”
LaPierre didn’t specify which past laws he had in mind, but it’s a safe bet that he was thinking about two high-profile pieces of legislation from the early 1990s. One was the Brady Law, which created a system of background checks for people purchasing guns. The other was the 1994 crime bill, which included a ban on some assault weapons. LaPierre is hardly the only person who thinks those laws demonstrate the futility of gun control. Most experts agree that the cumulative effect of the laws was, at best, modest.1
It’s one thing to say gun laws haven’t significantly reduced gun violence, but quite another to say they couldn’t.
But it’s one thing to say gun laws haven’t significantly reduced gun violence, quite another to say they couldn’t. Both the Brady Law and assault weapons ban had serious, specific flaws. The most conspicuous problem with the Brady Law was that it didn’t affect private sales: You could buy a gun from a non-licensed dealer—say, at a gun show—without anybody checking to make sure you didn’t have a criminal record or some other characteristic that made it illegal for you to have a weapon. The big loophole in the assault rifle ban was that its definition of prohibited weapons, which manufacturers were able to circumvent by making minor modifications to existing guns. But gun control advocates have learned a lot since that time. And that’s one reason to think the proposals now on the table could have a bigger impact than their predecessors did.
To be fair, it’s not as if architects of the Brady Law or assault weapons ban thought either law would have a huge impact on crime. It’s easy to forget now, but enactment of the Brady Law culminated a decade of political struggle against the opponents of gun control, particularly the National Rifle Association. It took the election of Bill Clinton, who had promised to sign such a bill as president, to break the logjam—and even then it was a struggle. “I remember going up to the final day of that vote, we were whipping it for over a month,” says Jim Kessler, who was an aide to then-Congressman Charles Schumer, one of the law’s co-sponsors, and is now senior vice president for policy at Third Way. “We did not have the support of the speaker, we did not have the judiciary chairman, Jack Brooks of Texas, we had to do it on our own—and up to the day of the vote, we felt we might not have the votes to pass.” Given that political reality, the advocates of gun laws knew they would be settling for highly imperfect legislation. One hope was that passing Brady would demonstrate the political viability of gun legislation, making it possible to pass stronger legislation later on. “The NRA had such a stranglehold around the neck of Congress, we knew that if we were going to get anything through, it had to be narrow,” says Richard Aborn, a former prosecutor who was president of the Brady Campaign during the early 1990s.
But advocates of gun legislation in the 1990s didn’t simply lack sufficient political power. They also lacked know-how. At the time, experts didn’t really understand gun shows—and they certainly didn’t grasp the role that gun shows might play in facilitating sales once the Brady Law was in effect. “The notion of private sales and, in particular, gun show leakage was not on ours, or anybody else’s, radar screen,” Aborn says. And even if lawmakers had been thinking about gun shows, it’s not clear how much they could have done to restrict sales, at least in that political environment: Requiring private dealers to run full background checks, cross-checking identifications with criminal records and such, would have been time-consuming and in some cases unwieldy. Tom Diaz, a former Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee and former policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, explains, “There was no established system to do the background check. It seems easy now, but in the mid-1990s there were no ‘apps’ and the communication among computers was fragile. It was just much easier and more realistic to require federal firearms licensees—i.e., dealers—to do the background check, since they were already regulated under existing law.”
Veterans of the assault weapons ban fight recall facing similar obstacles. Lack of technology wasn’t an issue, but lack of understanding about guns was. Diaz, author of a forthcoming book called The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It, remembers the crafting of that bill as a decidedly amateur exercise:
In the case of the assault weapons ban, it was as inelegant as this: a bunch of politicians (mostly in the Senate, then in the House as the Senate bill became the vehicle) who knew (and some still know) precious little or even nothing at all about guns in general and assault weapons in particular literally sewed together (1) a list of guns, like Uzis and AKs, and (2) a silly list of “features” (bells and whistles) that “defined” in law what an assault weapon was supposed to be. If the gun had two or more of these features, well, it was an assault weapon. The defect was that manufacturers easily just eliminated the bells and whistles, but kept the major design features that make assault weapons so problematic, namely the ability to accept a high-capacity magazine, and a pistol grip to hold the gun for rapid fire.
One sign that the advocates of new gun laws have learned from the past is that their proposals are more sophisticated, and savvy, than the ones they put forward last time.2 Under the assault weapons proposals circulating now, including the proposal from California Senator Diane Feinstein, a gun would be illegal if it had just one criteria of an automatic rifle, rather than two. Lawmakers are also talking about new restrictions on high-capacity magazines. Christopher Koper, a criminologist at George Mason who was co-author of the official Justice Department review of the old assault weapons ban, thinks a stronger law has potential. “Restrictions like the old ones on assault weapons and large capacity magazines probably won’t lower the overall rate of gun crime,” he says, “but they may modestly reduce shootings by reducing gun attacks with particularly high numbers of shots fired. My best estimate is that the impact on shootings would be under 5 percent overall. I wouldn’t consider this trivial, however, given the seriousness and social costs of shootings.”
More important, advocates for gun laws have quietly shifted their priorities. The assault weapons ban continues to get the most publicity, but the real focus—for advocates and the lawmakers they support—is on a better system of background checks. “Universal background checks… would have much greater impacts,” Koper says. “That could be a game-changer, but they also need to make sure the law is accompanied by meaningful penalties and enforcement.” The advocates for new gun laws seem to grasp that last point. And that includes the president. Obama has already ordered law enforcement agencies to trace the history of guns they seize in crimes. It was one of the executive orders he issued when he unveiled his full gun plan.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the new push for gun legislation is destined to succeed—or to have dramatic effects on crime. Lawmakers in more conservative and rural districts remain reluctant to take on the National Rifle Association and its allies. And even the new laws will have loopholes. The more government regulates gun purchases from legal dealers, for example, the more criminals will seek to get them illegally. And the more government limits the manufacturer certain types of weapons, the more criminals will use older, grandfathered versions—or get them from overseas.
But even a modest impact on violence would represent progress. It would create a framework on which future lawmakers can build stronger regulations and, in the meantime, it would save at least a few lives. “Just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can,” says Aborn. “Will it stop all gun crime? No. But … we don’t say repeal the murder statutes because it doesn’t stop all murders. There have to be reasonable expectations and a reasonable expectation is that it will make a difference and save some lives.”
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, January 31, 2013
“Can You Say “Whig’s”: The Only Thing For Republicans To Fear Is Never Getting Elected Again
Ah, bipartisanship. Can you smell it? Well it’s in the air again, as a group of eight senators (for the love of god, can we not call them a “gang”?), four Democrats and four Republicans, unveiled a proposal for immigration reform. It includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (an even faster one for seasonal agricultural workers, because what, do you expect native-born Americans to spend 10 hours a day bending over in the hot sun?), measures to improve the legal immigration system, and efforts to attract skilled immigrants. The proposal also stipulates that the path to citizenship would only happen after the implementation of stricter border enforcement, but one of the great unacknowledged developments of recent years is that border enforcement is far more vigorous than it used to be. We’ve got more Border Patrol agents making more arrests, and Barack Obama has deported people much faster than George W. Bush did (there were more than 400,000 deportations in 2012, a new record).
Immigration reform is looking rather likely to pass through Congress, and there’s one reason: fear. Republicans are terrified that unless they do something to reverse their abysmal performance among Latino voters in the last election, they could go the way of the Whigs. So even though most of them don’t really want to do it, enough of them could grit their teeth and vote yes on a comprehensive immigration reform package.
And that’s how bipartisanship happens: not when everyone realizes that they love their country more than they love their party, or when the cries of the public for comity in Congress become too loud, or even when a problem gets too big (as it happens, after years of steady increases, the number of undocumented immigrants has been stagnant since the Great Recession hit, mostly because there were fewer available jobs drawing immigrants here). Bipartisanship happens when preferences and raw political interest align to give both parties something they want or think they need. The Democrats have long wanted comprehensive immigration reform, and the Republicans now see it in their interest.
By: Paul Waldman and Jamie Fuller, The American Prospect, January 28, 2013
“The Urgency Of Growth”: Congressional Doom-Mongers Need To End Their Campaign Of Government By Deadline And Emergency
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.
The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.
Let’s call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.
Moreover, the whole point of an economy is to provide everyone with real opportunities for gainful employment and economic advance — the generational “relay” that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro affectingly described at last year’s Democratic convention. When we talk only about deficits, we take our eyes off the prize.
But there is good news. Gradually, establishment thinking is moving toward a new consensus that puts growth first and looks for deficit reduction over time. In the last few months, middle-of-the-road and moderately conservative voices have warned that if we cut the deficit too quickly, too soon, we could throw ourselves back into the economic doldrums — and increase the very deficit we are trying to reduce.
Here, for example, is excellent advice from the deservedly respected (and thoroughly pro-market) economic columnist Martin Wolf, offered last week in the Financial Times: “The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy. If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”
“Calm down” is exactly what we need to do. We have been inundated with apocalyptic prophecies about our debt levels. While they come from the center as well as the right, Republicans are using them to turn the next two years into a carnival of contrived crises. These will (1) make normal governing impossible — no agency can plan when budgets are always up in the air; (2) distract us — we need to think about measures, such as an infrastructure bank, that would promote prosperity now and into the future; and (3) drive business people crazy — no enterprise would put itself through the contortions that are becoming part of Washington’s routine.
Only if you believe that deficits mean the end is near can any of this be justified. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, perfectly encapsulated the effort to diminish the importance of all else (including growth) when he declared recently that “deficit and debt” constitute the “transcendent issue of our era.”
No, it’s not. As Bruce Bartlett, the bravely dissident conservative economics specialist wrote a few days ago: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”
Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers warned in The Post that we can’t “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans lives and what they bequeath to the next generation.” And economists at the International Monetary Fund have offered some honorable mea culpas about underestimating the damage that ill-timed austerity programs have done to growth — and to the fiscal positions of the nations affected by them.
You have to hope that President Obama will use his State of the Union message to speak forcefully for growth and the public investments that will foster it. But sensible people also need to rise up and tell the congressional doom-mongers that they have to calm down and end their wholly destructive campaign to turn our great system of self-rule into a government by deadline and emergency.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 27, 2013
“Looney Tunes”: The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Is Back, And As Crazy As Ever
Well, NRA crackpot Wayne LaPierre is back. He’s been laying low for a month, after his crackpot performances immediately after the Newtown mass murder, but the NRA apparently decided that (1) Obama’s inaugural speech was all about them, and (2) they needed, really, the biggest goddamn crackpot they could find to go up and “rebut” the mean things the president said. So here’s Wayne!
“Obama wants to turn the idea of absolutism into a dirty word,” LaPierre said. “Just another word for extremism. He wants you, all of you, and Americans throughout all of this country, to accept the idea of principles as he sees fit. It’s a way of redefining words so that common sense is turned upside down and that nobody knows the difference.” […]
It’s just like that guy once said, after all. [Absolutism] in defense of [any random citizen’s right to mow down classrooms full of elementary school children] is no vice—and how dare you attack the NRA for thinking so. LaPierre then, apparently, rejected all of his own past statements about how maybe we should enforce laws and make lists of batshit crazy people, asserting instead that Obama wants to make a national list of gun owners in order to, ya know, oppress them later. So now he’s against background checks.
“He wants to put every private, personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government,” LaPierre said. “He wants to keep all of those names in a massive federal registry. There’s only two reasons for a federal list on gun owners: to either tax ‘em or take ‘em. That’s the only reasons. And anyone who says that’s excessive, President Obama says that’s an absolutist.”
You see there? Last month Citizen Wayne here wanted us to make a list of all the people with dangerous mental problems in the country. Now he’s pissed off that someone’s suggesting maybe we use a list like that to make sure dangerous people don’t get guns, because that’d be just too infringing. Apparently that earlier list of dangerous, unbalanced Americans LaPierre suggested we create was merely supposed to be a list the NRA could use for their next membership drive.
If anyone was wondering whether the murder of 20 children would result in a moment of reflection by the off-the-rails NRA and other members of the gun lobby, I think we have our answer. There was a delay of, what, a week or so while LaPierre and others pondered how best to tell us that the murders were just fine, because trying to do something about them would be far worse. Then they stood up in front of the TV cameras and told America to go right to hell, because there was nothing, at least nothing that didn’t involve buying and using more guns, that they were going to “allow” us to do about it. No change in gun safety regulations; no change in who can buy guns, and how specifically those guns can be designed for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of people quickly; no nothing. If our communities want to afford themselves a little more safety, LaPierre explicitly says, the only way the fetishists are going to allow it is if it involves more people shooting at each other, not fewer.
We may be at the point where we can safely write these people off. We were at the point a while ago, of course, but if Wayne here keeps talking, we may be at the point where the thoroughly pistol-whipped Congress figures that out as well. We can hope, anyway.
By: Hunter, The Daily Kos, January 26, 2013
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