“It’s Time To Hold America’s Gunmakers Accountable”: An Unaccountable Industry Involved In Selling Products That Kill People
It’s not just Congress that fails to respond after another massacre briefly focuses attention on the irrationality and permissiveness of our country’s firearms statutes. Those of us seeking change also regularly fall down on the job. We express outrage and move on, leaving the debate exactly where we found it.
Opponents of the big gun interests are often insufficiently innovative in what we propose. Let’s face it: We have been losing this fight.
The solutions we suggest are rarely big enough to deal with the problem comprehensively. This opens up advocates of change to predictable attacks. This suggested law, gun-industry apologists say, would not have prevented that shooting. More broadly: How will your little proposals ever get a handle on guns when there are already more than 300 million of them on the streets? (Part of the answer: Deal with ammunition.)
We put ourselves at a steep disadvantage from the outset. We often get angry at rank-and-file gun owners who, in turn, see us as elitist big-city folks who don’t respect the traditions of those who have had weapons in their families for generations. Pro-reform politicians often don hunting outfits and shoot deer or birds to curry favor with those who mistrust them. Mostly, the politicians look silly. Anybody can put on a costume.
The time has come to recast this battle as a fight to hold those who make billions of dollars from the sale of firearms accountable for what their products do to individuals and communities. We must call for corporate responsibility, and enforce it by law if it’s not forthcoming. And President Obama, whose outrage about guns many of us share, must be willing to go well beyond what he has done so far.
As is their way, the community organizers and activists at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) are pushing the president to use the federal government’s purchasing power to promote safer guns. To do business with the government, companies would have to be willing to “remove the barriers to getting smart guns and gun safety technologies to market” and cooperate with law enforcement to “identify and isolate dealers that provide large numbers of guns used in crimes.”
Governments at all levels account for roughly 40 percent of gun-industry revenues. The federal government alone accounts for about 25 percent. Taxpayers have a right to demand responsibility from an industry that gets so much of our money.
The president won’t much like the slogan of a Metro IAF news conference scheduled for Thursday across from the White House in Lafayette Square — “Clergy and Citizens to President Obama: Stop Whining, Start Working to Curb Gun Deaths.” But the former community organizer might appreciate this: Since his administration has been reluctant to use the taxpayers’ power in the weapons marketplace to promote accountability from the big gunmakers, outside pressure might make it easier for him to do the right thing.
He also faces prodding from his fellow Democrats. Both Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have put forward comprehensive gun proposals that are more adventurous than the ideas Obama has embraced. O’Malley deserves particular credit for going far beyond the highly constricted gun-policy conversation. His comprehensive plan includes a proposal that echoes the IAF in mandating that the federal government buy weapons only from manufacturers who adopt basic safety measures and the microstamping of weapons.
Arnie Graf, a longtime IAF organizer, explains that microstamping can allow law enforcement to trace guns and bullets used in crimes. “Smart guns” that could be used only by their owners would vastly reduce trafficking, prevent accidents and diminish suicides. And because a relatively small number of dealers are responsible for the sale of a large number of weapons used in crime, focusing on those dealers (and demanding that the gun companies stop selling to them) could further reduce gun violence.
So let’s talk less about the National Rifle Association and more about those whose interests the NRA serves, the big weapons sellers such as Sturm, Ruger & Co., Smith & Wesson, SIG Sauer, Beretta, Glock and Freedom Group. Let’s insist that Obama put his anger to work. And let’s use our proven capacity for technological innovation to reduce violence.
Responsible business people care about the well-being of their communities and live with all sorts of health and safety regulations. They above all should see how profoundly misguided it is that one of the least accountable industries in the United States involves enterprises selling products that kill people.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 7, 2015
“A Genuinely Dangerous Situation”: The Republican Party’s Dysfunction Is An Embarrassment To Us All
The movement within the House Republican conference to make Paul Ryan the next speaker has evolved into a desperate clamor, with members from almost every faction practically begging him to enter the race.
Ryan remains reluctant, if not quite Shermanesque in his reluctance, and for obvious reasons. Ryan has political ambitions beyond the House, but knows that the speakership is an office built to destroy a Republican leader’s partisan bona fides. Ryan is a great theoretical fit for the speakership, because he shares the right’s ideological extremism and the party establishment’s pragmatism, but stands to lose his good will with conservatives the instant he applies that pragmatism to funding the government or increasing the debt limit.
Under the circumstances, the only way for him to occupy the speakership without cashing in all his political stock would be to bring the House Freedom Caucus to heel in advance: Make its members pledge support to him, irrespective of his tactical opposition to defaulting on the debt and shutting down the government. The central question is whether House hardliners are chastened enough after two weeks of chaos to let Ryan dictate terms to them, not the other way around, and we have no indication that they are yet.
Assuming Ryan sticks to his guns and refuses the speakership (and that Boehner will ultimately resign, whether or not a new speaker has been elected), rank and file Republicans are going to have to take a serious look at forming a temporary coalition with Democrats.
At this point, Congress accomplishes little more than the bare minimum required to maintain status quo governance. Sometimes it’s unable to muster even that (see the Export-Import Bank, for just one example). But this thin record isn’t the bragging right of the Republican Party. It’s a bipartisan effort. And in the House, it’s mostly a Democratic one. The onus is on Democrats to supply most of the votes for the handful of things Congress actually does.
Under the circumstances, there’s a real logic to electing a coalition speaker—a placeholder who doesn’t fear activist retribution and can basically keep his hand on the tiller for the next year and a half, accomplishing little, but creating no damage. This person might have to make some nominal concessions to Democrats—no more debt limit or appropriations-driven extortion crises. Maybe the Benghazi committee would have to go. But the output of Congress would basically go unchanged.
The reason this is so unlikely, of course, is that partisan realities are solidified. Most Republicans might secretly wish for a drama-free resolution to the speakership crisis, but none of them want to place their careers on the line to join the coalition. Democrats, too, have a strong incentive to let Republicans eat themselves alive.
But that is ultimately the source of the House Freedom Caucus’ power. If one Republican were willing to make the sacrifice, or Boehner were willing to stick it out for the remainder of his elected term, the Freedom Caucus would be neutered. Instead, the Freedom Caucus is empowered to play whack-a-mole with various pretenders to the speakership, and can hold out until a candidate emerges who will make insane promises to them, and then attempt to deliver. Crises at every turn. Everyone loses, except them—and perhaps the press, which is understandably reveling in this story.
There’s also probably some difficult-to-measure upside for Democrats, who right now look like the model of competence and maturity compared to Republicans. But on the whole, it’s a disaster. There’s nothing partisan or biased about saying that one of the two major political parties in the country is broken, unable to work within its main governing institution, liable to inflict severe economic damage on the country. It’s a genuinely bad state of affairs, a huge embarrassment for the country, and—unless Boehner, Ryan, or some other white knight asserts himself—a genuinely dangerous situation.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor at The New Republic, October 9, 2015
“Sensible Gun Owners Should Abhor The NRA”: The NRA Has Elevated Firearms Ownership To A Religion
My father loved hunting game in the woods of rural Alabama. His idea of a good time involved getting up in the wee hours of a chilly fall morning and going out to sit for hours in a tree stand, waiting for a buck to come within range.
As a gun owner, he was not at all unusual among his friends and family members, many of whom kept pistols, rifles and shotguns. A veteran of Korea, he saw firearms as an essential tool.
But my father would not recognize today’s National Rifle Association or its many counterparts — a gun lobby that insists Americans ought to be free to carry their firearms into churches, schools, and bars. He would have thought that was a crazy idea that would make the world more dangerous, not safer.
He would have been horrified by the plague of mass shootings, the latest of which claimed nine innocent victims at Umpqua Community College in southern Oregon earlier this month. And he certainly would not have believed that the massacre could have been prevented if more of the faculty and students had been armed.
What has happened to responsible gun owners like my father? Where did the sane hunters go? Why aren’t they standing up to protest the outrageous politics of the NRA?
My father died in 1984, before the gun lobby became completely unhinged. Indeed, its political transformation into a network of firearms extremists has been so complete that many Americans don’t know that the NRA started out as an organization of sportsmen who taught marksmanship and gun safety skills.
In 1934, Karl Frederick, then NRA president, told Congress, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. … I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
Needless to say, the NRA has all but erased, Soviet-style, that part of its history from official records. By the late 1970s, the organization had started along a path of strident advocacy that has elevated firearms ownership to a religion. The organization and its several counterparts have formed a vast political network that threatens any politician who pleads for modest regulation, that insists on arming every man, woman and child, that feeds its supporters propaganda to fuel their paranoia. Its leaders have brainwashed their followers into believing that the government wishes to confiscate all guns and subjugate citizens, a proposition too crazy to tackle rationally (so I won’t).
But responsible gun owners certainly ought to be fighting back against that nonsense and demanding sensible politics from the gun lobby that purports to represent them. Why don’t they?
By 1982, the gun lobby had become so powerful that it was able to pass legislation that prevents the federal government from keeping a database linking firearms to their owners. In other words, the sort of information readily available about vehicles or houses is not available about guns. That makes tracing firearms used in crimes much more difficult.
The gun lobby has also managed to prevent the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence as a public health hazard. As President Obama noted after the Umpqua massacre,
“We spend over a trillion dollars and pass countless laws and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil. … And, yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”
My dad never carried a pistol on his person. He certainly didn’t think he should have one at church or at the school where he served as principal.
He didn’t want me to own a gun, either; he thought I’d be better off with a good burglar alarm and a big dog. He knew better than to think that more firearms equal enhanced safety.
What happened to sensible gun owners like him?
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, October 10, 2015
“Paul Ryan’s Choice; Speaker or Sanity?”: An Intransigent Group, The Far Right Is Already Grumbling About Him
Even as an energetic group of Republicans try to jostle Rep. Paul Ryan into running for House speaker, the fact remains that the Wisconsin Republican would face a perilous situation—essentially the same hostile environment of infighting that John Boehner has had enough of.
Even if Ryan were to swoop in to save the day, the calculations would remain the same: a class of House Republicans that cannot find sufficient internal consensus to govern consistently without crisis. This is something even the most fervent Ryan fans admit.
“You get the honor of making a speech before they tar and feather you every day,” acknowledged Rep. Darrell Issa, even as he spoke at length about how Ryan should run, though he was considering it himself. “He is obviously dealing with the fact that this isn’t the job he asked for, or even wants, but may be a job that the conference needs him to take.”
“It’s very difficult for anyone so long as any group thinks they have veto power and they can hijack and blackmail the House,” added Rep. Peter King of New York, another lawmaker who is urging Ryan to enter the race.
Following a meeting of the Republican conference in the subterranean rooms of the Capitol, Issa indicated that the private conversations inside were dominated by lawmakers encouraging Ryan to run.
“He’s both vetted and has the experience of now chairing not one but two committees. I think what you’re hearing in there is the preparatory work for a more successful Congress once we have a new speaker, but you’re also hearing people universally, or nearly universally asking Paul Ryan to go home over the weekend and reconsider,” Issa said.
Issa also strongly implied that he had talked to Ryan, and that Ryan had agreed to reconsider a bid for the speakership over the next few days.
But there are already signs that if Ryan were to become speaker, he’d still face an intransigent group of unyielding conservatives—the same problem that made the job so unwieldy for Boehner. On conservative blogs, commentators were also pouring cold water on the idea of a Ryan speakership, arguing that Ryan was soft on immigration and criminal justice.
“Paul Ryan Is the Absolute Worst Choice for Speaker,” blared one headline on the conservative website Breitbart.com; “Will Paul Ryan Be the Next Speaker? I Hope Not,” read another, on the Powerline blog.
“I don’t think it’s the face” of the speaker that matters, said Rep. David Brat, the conservative Virginia lawmaker who unseated former Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “It’s the principle.”
On Friday, less than 24 hours after Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made the shocking announcement that he would be abruptly pulling out of the race for speaker, Ryan’s office released a second statement reiterating that he is not running for the position. “Chairman Ryan appreciates the support he’s getting from his colleagues but is still not running for speaker,” Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said.
Fundamentally, McCarthy and Ryan have similar voting records—the American Conservative Union gives Ryan a lifetime 90 rating, while McCarthy has a lifetime 88.63. But they do differ in terms of overall force of personality and image: Ryan has forged a reputation as the chairman of two committees, and as the vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party in the 2012 elections.
Close friends indicate that the drawback for Ryan is that he has a young family, and hint that his wife is a key voice against a potential candidacy.
When Rep. Trey Gowdy was asked what it would take to get Ryan to become a candidate for speaker, he responded, “You’ll have to ask Janna Ryan that question,” referring to the congressman’s wife.
“Paul is going to have to do some soul-searching and decide whether that’s something he wants to do,” added Rep. Bill Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, October 9, 2015
“There’s Nothing But Chaos In The Republican Ranks”: GOP Leader Shocks Colleagues, Withdraws From Speaker’s Race
Thirteen days ago, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) shocked the political world by announcing his plan to resign. This morning, Boehner’s successor followed up with a shock of his own.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has abruptly pulled out of the race for Speaker of the House on the same day that he was widely expected to be nominated for the position.
The nominating contest in the GOP conference set for Thursday afternoon in the House has been postponed.
There is a degree of irony to all of this: Benghazi didn’t bring down Hillary Clinton, but it did prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker.
The California Republican faced two challengers for his party’s Speaker nomination, but by all appearances, he had the support he needed to go to the floor as his party’s official choice. As recently as last night, McCarthy’s bid was on track to move forward.
The problem was the looming floor vote on Oct. 29 – the opposition to his promotion from the far-right was significant and he faced a real challenge in pulling together 218 GOP votes.
Even if he prevailed, McCarthy would have immediately taken the gavel and become an even weaker Speaker than Boehner.
A week ago, the landscape seemed relatively clear. The GOP establishment had rallied behind McCarthy, and though there were some questions about the other top posts, we’d have a sense of the new Republican leadership team by this afternoon.
Now, however, there’s nothing but chaos in the Republican ranks. It’s reminiscent of late 1998, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) resigned in disgrace, and his successor, Speaker-designate Bob Livingston (R-La.), also had to resign in disgrace after a sex scandal came to light.
The difference now is, the only scandal is the radicalization of Republican politics.
So what happens now? All of the leadership elections that had been scheduled for today have been postponed. The date of the new elections is unclear. McCarthy reportedly intends to stay in Congress – indeed, he apparently wants to keep his Majority Leader position – though it seems everything is unsettled right now.
The party’s establishment will have to rally behind a new standard bearer, though no one has any idea who that might be. All eyes will, of course, quickly turn to Paul Ryan, but the far-right Wisconsin congressman reiterated again this morning that he does not want to be Speaker of the House.
Because House rules allow members to elect anyone for Speaker – including those who are not current lawmakers – don’t be too surprised if GOP officials start looking to potential leaders outside of Capitol Hill.
What’s more, let’s not discount the possibility that John Boehner himself may stick around, indefinitely, while the chaos continues, House Republicans turn on each other, the chamber unravels, and Congress struggles mightily to find a suitable leader.
Finally, I heard one rumor a short while ago, which is admittedly hard to believe, about some less-conservative Republicans turning to Democrats to try to elect a “coalition-style Speaker,” in a scheme that would disempower the chamber right-wing extremists.
It’s far-fetched, to be sure, but after the last 13 days, it’s now best to expect the unexpected.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 8, 2015
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