“Madness Has No Rights”: Will Americans Ever Be Ready To Challenge The Gun Cult?
Another week, another disturbed young man, another mass killing spree. It’s come to the point where episodes like Elliot Rodger’s murder of four men and two women near the Cal-Santa Barbara campus have become so frequent in America that the crime scene tapes have hardly been removed before people turn them into political symbols.
At which point any possibility of taking anything useful away from the tragedy ends. I certainly have no answer for the eloquent cry of Richard Martinez, whose 20 year-old son Christopher, a stranger to the killer, was shot dead in the street.
“Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA,” he cried. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”
Such is the downright Satanic power of the gun cult in this country, however, that Martinez may as well never have spoken. Every poll available shows that Democrats, Republicans and gun owners alike favor, at minimum, stronger background checks aimed at keeping semi-automatic killing machines away from disturbed individuals like Rodger.
Yet nothing happens, basically because Second Amendment cultists exercise a stranglehold on the political process. If the Newtown, CT massacre of elementary school children didn’t cause a rethink, no misogynist shooting down sorority girls is going to change a thing.
It’s really quite bizarre, but until some certifiably conservative politician takes on the NRA and wins, spree killings will remain a depressing feature of American life. We could make it much harder for deranged people to acquire arsenals without greatly inconveniencing legitimate gun owners, but we haven’t got the guts to give it a serious try.
Then there’s the customary inadequacy of our laws relating to involuntary commitment of persons deemed an active threat to themselves or others — very roughly the legal standard in most jurisdictions. I got into an online debate recently with Lindsay Beyerstein, a young journalist whose work I admire. She argued that Rodger should be classified as a “misogynist terrorist,” who targeted a sorority house as part of his “WAR ON WOMEN” (his words).
“Here’s why he did it,” Beyerstein wrote. “He was distraught because he had never had a girlfriend. He was enraged because he believed he was entitled to sex and adulation from women. He believed that women would never be attracted to him because women are sub-human animals who are instinctively attracted to ‘brutish,’ ‘stupid’ men, instead of magnificent gentlemen like himself. Women, in his view, should not be allowed to make their own decisions about whom to have sex with, because, as subhuman animals, they are incapable of choosing the good men.”
All true. However, I thought calling it terrorism was beside the point. The specific content of a psychotic person’s delusions has little reference to anything outside his own mind. It’s a funhouse mirror version of reality. I’m guessing Rodger was a big porn fan with no understanding of real women.
Beyerstein convinced me I’d spoken too loosely. Nothing released about Rodger so far shows clear evidence of mental illness — defined as a treatable brain disease like schizophrenia.
So we settled on a New Jerseyism: agreeing that Rodger was one sick pup. Not exactly how Tony Soprano would phrase it, but safe for newspapers. Sick enough that his own mother called police after seeing his bizarre YouTube videos ranting about wicked “blonde sluts” who ruined his life — pure paranoid ideation, in my view, but I am not a psychiatrist.
Where I live (Arkansas), the standard for involuntary committal to a lockdown mental health facility is basically the aforementioned “danger to oneself or others” — pretty much regardless of diagnosis, although psychiatric testimony helps. Alas most people don’t know how the system works. Petitioners have to be both sophisticated and determined to get anything done. Most families just hunker down and pray.
That tends to be true everywhere. In the case of Elliot Rodger, there should have been better two-way communication. California authorities say sheriff’s deputies who visited his apartment found a polite, shy kid who seemed no threat. (His posthumous manifesto expresses fear the cops would find his guns and mad videos.)
But shouldn’t there have been two-way communication? Maybe instead of just dispatching deputies, they should have talked with his mother first. Maybe she’s an alarmist; maybe not. I’m told some California jurisdictions do this as a matter of course.
Liberals and conservatives alike worry overmuch about the rights of mentally disturbed people. This isn’t the USSR. Nobody’s hospitalizing eccentrics or dissenters. Madness, however, has no rights. Acting otherwise is like letting children play in traffic. Alas, it appears Americans will face the problem soon after enacting sensible gun laws.
In short, probably never.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, May 28, 2014
“Feeling A Bit Of Anxiety”: Cantor’s Cause For Concern In The Commonwealth
The idea that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) would worry at all about his re-election seems hard to believe. The conservative Republican has fared quite well in all of his campaigns; he’s already quite powerful by Capitol Hill standards; and in the not-too-distant future, Cantor might even be well positioned to be Speaker of the House.
And yet, the Majority Leader appears to be feeling quite a bit of anxiety about his future.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is boasting in a new campaign mailer of shutting down a plan to give “amnesty” to “illegal aliens,” a strongly worded statement from a Republican leader who’s spoken favorably about acting on immigration.
The flier sent by his re-election campaign comes as Cantor is under pressure ahead of his June 10 GOP primary in Virginia – and as the narrow window for action on immigration legislation in the House is closing fast. Cantor’s flier underscores how vexing the issue is for the GOP.
In the larger context, it’s not helpful for Republicans when the Majority Leader brags about killing a bill that gives “amnesty” to “illegal aliens,” while his party tries to maintain a half-hearted pretense that blames President Obama for the demise of immigration reform.
But at this point, Cantor doesn’t appear to care too much about the larger context or message coherence. He’s worried about losing – the rest can be worked out later.
In fact, the degree of Cantor’s anxiety is pretty remarkable. The Majority Leader is up against David Brat, a conservative economist at Randolph-Macon College, who’s eagerly telling primary voters that Cantor isn’t right-wing enough. What was once seen as token opposition, however, has clearly gotten the incumbent’s attention.
Cantor was concerned enough last month to launch a television attack ad, which was followed by Cantor’s anti-immigrant mailing, which culminated in yet another television attack ad that the congressman’s campaign unveiled yesterday.
These are not the actions of a confident incumbent.
As best as I can tell, there are no publicly available polls out of this Virginia district (though it’s safe to say Cantor has invested in some surveys of his own). With that in mind, it’s hard to say with any confidence whether the Majority Leader is overreacting to a pesky annoyance or a credible challenger.
But Jenna Portnoy and Robert Costa reported recently that it’s probably the former, not the latter.
Most Republicans continue to believe Cantor is safe; he won a primary challenge two years ago with nearly 80 percent of the vote. But the prospect of a competitive and bruising challenge to the second-ranking Republican in Congress is embarrassing to Cantor – and is rattling GOP leaders at a time when the party is trying to unify its divided ranks.
We’ll know soon enough just how serious the threat is – the primary is in 13 days – but as the election draws closer, let’s not forget that Cantor was booed and heckled by Republican activists in his own district just two weeks ago.
No wonder he seems so nervous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2014
“Conservative Intellectual Bankruptcy”: Where The Right’s Gun Logic Falls Apart
The “Obama administration” and “gun registry.” Put those words together in a sentence and its guaranteed to trigger conservative apoplexy. But now the Obama administration really is about to start cataloging guns, and it’s eliciting little more than approving head nods from the right. How can that be? Here’s how.
For as long as anyone can remember, the right’s fought tooth and nail against any effort to limit access to just about any kind of firearm. Handgun, AK-47, bazooka — if it fires something at killing speed, you should be able to have it.
And for just about the same timeframe, they’ve fought just as hard to prevent the federal government from trying to keep track of who owns weapons in the United States. Their position (boiled down): Everyone should have guns, and no one should know who has guns. Suggest even the most incremental steps towards regulating gun possession and, to hear the right tell it, it’s as if the redcoats are back on the march in Lexington and Concord. A more fundamental threat to our liberties can hardly be imagined.
Now the Department of Justice has announced that it’s going to catalog how many guns the federal government has in its possession and, one imagines, exactly who has them. Red alert! DEFCON 5! (Or 1, whichever is worse!) It’s a gun registry! Confiscation is right around the corner! All is lost! Right? Right?
Actually, if I’m reading my right-wing websites correctly, apparently not. In fact, they seem to think it’s a move that’s long overdue.
How, you may ask, can this be? If knowing who has guns is a bad thing, how can we be OK with the government finding out more about who has guns? Let’s think this through.
What would be the purpose of finding out more about who in the general population owns guns? To help us have a greater understanding of gun violence, and to solve gun crimes when they happen. Why do people on the right oppose a gun registry? Because they see a greater threat in the possibility that the federal government will try to restrict their use of guns or even take them away.
Now, let’s turn the analysis around. What’s the purpose of drilling down on the amount of guns in the federal government? Maybe it has to do with something as mundane as budgeting. Or perhaps its part of an effort to ensure that we are narrowly tailoring the distribution of firearms across the federal bureaucracy to those who actually need them.
If that’s the reason, the hard right should be going nuts. Why? Because it opens the door to the notion that there ought to be an analytical screen between guns and those who seek to carry them, and that there are good reasons to restrict access to guns even among law abiding, mentally competent people. Acknowledging the utility of doing that on the federal level makes it harder to argue against doing it elsewhere.
But the right doesn’t oppose. They support. And again, it has to do with their perception of threat. In this case, it’s apparently the idea that the federal government might be arming itself as part of a plan to subject the general population to the tyranny of the state. Yup. That’s what they’re afraid of.
Now, if you can get past the silliness of that notion, you might say a federal government that has the United States Army at its disposal (to say nothing of the other branches of the military) doesn’t much need to arm anyone else to take over just about anything. And if the federal government is preparing to crack down on average citizens, you might think that tanks, attack helicopters and bunker busting bombs would do the trick. But to admit that would also be admitting that arming citizens really isn’t a hedge against tyranny at all. And of course, it isn’t. But that kind of thinking — call it “logic” — doesn’t feature prominently in the right’s postulations about these kinds of things.
It would be easy to dismiss the right’s ideas about things like this if they weren’t having such an impact on public policy. The people who think the government is on the verge of tyranny are, not infrequently, the same people driving a much larger agenda in the GOP. You can see the push to mainstream their far out ideas everywhere from health care to the environment to tax policy to, yes, guns. And it means that we are increasingly memorializing into law policies that reflect a fantasyland view of America rather than the America most of us live in. That’s not good.
So I say: Bring on the gun count! If for no other reason than this seems to be one of those cases where one brand of right-wing nuttiness (Government tyranny!) is running headlong into another (Bazookas for all!). And if that helps put the brakes on either, then we’ll all be better off.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, May 29, 2014
“Enough Slaughter”: When Carnage Becomes Routine, We Lose More Than Lives
I am running out of words.
Some crackpot who couldn’t get a date stabs and shoots his way across the Southern California college town of Isla Vista, killing six people and wounding 13 before apparently turning his gun on himself. This happened Friday night. And what shall I say about that?
I mean, I know how this goes. We all do. Weren’t you sort of expecting it when the father of one of the Isla Vista victims blamed his son’s death on the NRA? Would you really be stunned if the NRA countered that none of this would have happened had there been more guns in Isla Vista? And now, this is the part where I am supposed to offer context, to mourn these losses and use them in an argument for sensible gun laws.
We’ve seen it all before, in Newtown, in Tucson, at Virginia Tech, at the Navy Yard in Washington, at that movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. We’ve seen it so much that there is by now a rote sense to it, a sense of going through motions and checking off boxes, of flinging words against indifferent walls with no real expectation the words will change anything — or even be heard.
So I am running out of words. Or maybe just faith in words.
Which ones shall I use? “Sickening?” “Obscene?” “Grotesque?” “Tragic?” You’ve read them all a hundred times. Do they still have power to punch your gut? And what argument shall I use those words to make? Shall I observe that a gun is a weapon of mass destruction and that mentally impaired people should not have access to them? Shall I point out that as a statistical matter, a gun in the home is far more likely to hurt someone you love than to scare off a burglar? Shall I demand we hold our leaders accountable for failing to pass some kind of sensible laws to rein this madness in?
And if I do, do you suppose it will make any difference?
It is a measure of a uniquely American insanity that truths so obvious and inarguable are regarded as controversial and seditious by many people in this country. Indeed, Georgia recently enacted a law allowing guns in churches, school zones, bars, government buildings, even parts of airports. You think those words and that argument will find any purchase there? Don’t hold your breath.
This is why I am running out of words, or faith in words. Too much blood, pain and death. And the dictionary is finite.
I’ll tell you something, though. I grew up in South Los Angeles and lived there at the height of the drug wars of the 1980s. Seemed there was a mass shooting every weekend. They became so routine it seemed like the local paper pretty much stopped paying attention. You’d see a write-up on the back page of the metro section — six dead, three wounded — and that would be it. They reported it like the stats of some out-of-town ball team. Our deaths were routine.
But when carnage becomes routine, we lose more than lives. We lose some essential element of our very humanity. Seven people died in Isla Vista. Then, on Sunday night, a 14-year-old Miami boy argued with his 16-year-old brother over clothing, shot him to death, then killed himself. That same weekend in Detroit, a mentally ill teenager was arrested in the shooting death of his mother’s fiancé. And in Chicago, eight people were shot, one killed, in less than eight hours beginning Monday afternoon.
So I guess I cannot afford to run out of words — or faith. None of us can. Running out of words is an act of surrender, an obeisance to the obscene. Running out of words is running out of outrage. Both those who died and those of us left behind deserve better than that. Our humanity deserves better than that. Here, then, is one final word flung against that high and indifferent wall:
Enough, you hear me?
Enough.
Enough.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National memo, May 28, 2014
“The Winds Of No Change”: Defining Moments For The Tea Party Movement And The GOP
In his latest New York Times column, Ross Douthat notes the civil war over the “GOP civil war” narrative of this election cycle, and argues the real proof of the Tea Party pudding will be in the 2016 Republican presidential campaign:
[T]here are several politicians, all elected as insurgents and all potential presidential candidates in 2016, who still aspire to be the Tea Party’s version of Obama: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And because each embodies different facets of the Tea Party phenomenon, each would write a very different conclusion to its story.
A Rubio victory would probably make the Tea Party seem a little less ideological in hindsight, a little more Middle American and populist, and more like a course correction after George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” than a transformative event.
A Cruz triumph would lend itself to a more ideological reading of the Tea Party’s impact, but one that fit readily into existing categories: It would suggest that Tea Party-ism was essentially the old Reagan catechism in a tricorn hat, movement conservatism under a “don’t tread on me” banner.
A Paul victory would write a starkly libertarian conclusion to the Tea Party’s story, making it seem much more revolutionary — a true break with both Reaganism and Bushism, with an uncertain future waiting beyond.
I tend to agree with Douthat on his basic point: nothing quite defines a political party like its presidential nominees, which is why presidential nominating contests are important beyond their impact on general elections. But I still think he underestimates the extent to which the GOP has already internalized the Tea Party message, even as the Tea Folk are mostly conservative “base” activists who have been radicalized in recent years. Consider this line:
[T]he one thing about Republican politics that pretty clearly wasn’t “Tea Party” was the man the G.O.P. ultimately nominated in 2012.
Is that really true? Pretty early in the 2012 cycle, Romney embraced the single most important programmatic demand of the Tea Party Movement, the Republican Study Committee’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, which offered a permanent, constitutional limitation on the size and cost and therefore the functions of the federal government. And in the defining moment of the general election campaign, the 47% video, Romney embraced and articulated the resentment of “winners” against “losers” that was at the heart of the Tea Party Movement’s founding event, Rick Santelli’s Rant.
You can object that Mitt was just pandering, and didn’t really mean the things he said in those two instances, just as he really wasn’t the savage immigrant-basher he seemed to be when going after poor clueless Rick Perry–or for that matter, the Movement Conservative favorite he purported to be in 2008. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? He was pushed in that direction again and again by the prevailing winds in his party, and no matter who wins what 2014 primaries, or which flavor of tea is selling best at any given moment, the wind’s still blowing in that direction today.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 27, 2014
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