“Paralyzed By A Crazed Gun Lobby”: Gun Advocacy Has Now Become Parody
When I was growing up in the Cold War era, teachers instructed their pupils in the fine art of ducking under the desk as a shield against a strike from an atom bomb. That was a futile exercise, of course: A desktop provides no protection from the powerful destructive capacity of a nuclear weapon.
But it allowed teachers and their charges to pretend to have a defense against a frightening communist enemy whose might nearly equaled our own. It created a psychological barrier against helplessness.
These days, teachers train to protect their students from armed madmen who shoot up schools. They are taught to recognize not just the sound of gunfire in the hallway but also to hear the bone-chilling thump of an empty clip hitting the floor. They learn to hide their students; they memorize escape routes; they practice throwing ordinary classroom tools, like staplers, at an armed assailant.
As schools search for solutions, a manufacturer’s spokesman said sales of a product called the “Bodyguard Blanket,” a bulletproof covering that might offer a bit of protection from a school shooter, have been surprisingly strong. Why wouldn’t it sell quickly? Since the December 2012 Newtown massacre, there has been, on average, a similar incident every five weeks, according to CNN.
However, there’s a huge difference between the dangerous enemy we confronted in my youth and the current menace: Average citizens could defeat the lunacy now threatening our children. We are not helpless. Instead, for reasons that I simply cannot fathom, we are paralyzed by a crazed gun lobby.
It’s difficult to adequately describe our sense of defeatism in the face of the firearms fanatics. We don’t fight back when they insist on laws allowing guns in schools, in bars, in churches. We throw up our hands when they resist background checks. We shrug when another child is gunned down at school.
Oh, polls show our support for common-sense measures that would curb the death rate. After Newtown — when 20 small children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School — 91 percent of Americans supported background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and private sales. Yet the Senate could not manage to pass a bill that closed the “gun show loophole.”
It’s unlikely that any of the senators who voted against the measure will be called to account in the only way that matters — with defeat. While 41 Republicans (and five Democrats) voted against the bill, the GOP is expected to gain seats in November’s elections. What kind of message does that send to the gun fanatics?
Meanwhile, the gun lobby’s favorite arguments for its positions have been, well, gunned down. Gun advocates claim that widespread firearms ownership by responsible law-abiding citizens would help to stop the carnage. They insist that a would-be school shooter, for example, would be killed before he could hurt anyone if only teachers were armed.
Experience shows it rarely works that way. Earlier this month, anti-government extremists, husband-and-wife team Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers in Las Vegas, ambushing the officers as they ate lunch. The couple then went to a nearby Walmart, where they encountered an armed citizen, Joseph Wilcox, who spotted Jerad and tried to stop him. Wilcox, too, was shot dead.
Facts, however, don’t faze the National Rifle Association and its allies, who have long since descended into a lunacy that rivals parody. Consider this: Recently, gun fetishists in Texas have begun demonstrating their support for “open carry” laws by carrying their heavy-duty weapons into restaurants. They’ve posted pictures of themselves with their assault-style weapons — civilian versions of rifles such as the AK-47 — strapped to their backs as stunned diners look on.
The NRA posted an opinion piece on its website discouraging those antics: “It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates,” the writer said. Guess what? Within a few days, a backlash ensued from the gun cult, and the NRA disowned the commentary.
This is Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole madness. What does it say about the rest of us that we allow it to rule?
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 14, 2014
“Republicans Aren’t Pro-Life”: They’re Just Pro-Birth, And There’s A Big Difference
One of the main platforms of the Republicans is that, as a party, they say they are definitively pro-life. But if you really look closely at their stance on weapons, abortion, food stamps, global warming, minimum wage, veterans, prisons, etc… you have to wonder how they can make that claim.
AK47, military-style weapons and large magazine clips are part of the Republican chant. They claim it is their Second Amendment right to bear these arms, but even in Wyatt Earp’s Dodge City, outsiders were told to leave their guns at the city limits. Today Republicans, who are funded and graded by the NRA, want to have guns not only for self-protection, but also for showmanship. They believe it is their right to carry weapons everywhere including family restaurants, bars, classrooms and churches.
On average, three people are killed by a gun every hour and approximately seven are shot. How can anyone who says they are pro-life also be pro-weapon? If the Republican Party truly believes life is sacred, then why do they insist on unrestricted assault weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill — rather than reasonable gun regulations?
I also wonder how, on the one hand, a pro-life Republican demands that pregnant women have their unwanted children. Yet on the other hand, choose to cut food stamps that help feed these women and children. Did they ever consider the financial responsibilities involved in raising a child when they voted to close down small clinics that perform abortions and insurance coverage for birth control?
Currently, the Republicans are suggesting paying for summer lunches but only for rural kids, not urban ones. In other words, they want to provide food for the mostly rural white kids, but not provide food for the mainly minority, inner-city kids. How do these actions match their pro-life philosophy?
If you are pro-life, I would bet that you would vote for the right to breathe… but, a breath free of pollution is becoming more and more difficult these days. Republicans, like Florida’s Marco Rubio, continue to deny man’s role in climate change and denounce any scientific evidence. Is this really a pro-life stance when the impact to our children and grandchildren will be devastating?
The Republicans boast pro-life but also oppose raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to a living income. If they are really for life, then why would they be against paying a living wage that makes it possible for people who work to put food on their table? Not only is voting for the increase in minimum wage the right decision, but it also makes good business sense. Henry Ford, a leading businessman of his time, understood if he didn’t pay his workers enough to buy his product, then he wouldn’t prosper; today’s Republicans like Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz obviously believe otherwise.
Something else to ponder is when you vote for war, but against taking care of the wounded warriors, is that really being pro-life? Sending men and women into battle seems to be easy for Republicans, yet only two Republicans, Sens. Dean Heller and Jerry Moran, voted for a bill that would improve veterans’ healthcare and other benefits.
Republican state governors like Idaho’s Butch Otter and Virginia’s Bob McDonnell don’t want to expand Medicaid, even though it is virtually free to them. Without the federal funds, fewer people can receive healthcare, and many will die. Doesn’t sound much like a pro-life stance to me.
The Republican House voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA yet kept their government funded healthcare. How can they say no to improved healthcare for our war heroes, but accept it for themselves? Do they only believe in pro-life when it’s opportune?
When it comes to the death penalty, the same Republicans stating they are pro-life don’t seem to think twice about having someone put to death in their state — even though many of the accused people who were once on death row have been exonerated. Texas Governor Rick Perry brags about the number of executions that have taken place under his governorship. Do they understand that even if the person is guilty, they are taking someone’s life?
Republicans aren’t pro-life. They are just pro-birth. And there’s a big difference between the two.
By: Gerry Myers, CEO, President and Co-Founder of Advisory Link; The Huffington Post Blog, June 4, 2014
“Guns And Mental Illness”: Maybe We Should Be Making It Harder To Get Guns, Period
It is difficult to read stories about Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who went on a murderous spree in Isla Vista, Calif., last month, without feeling some empathy for his parents.
We know that his mother, alarmed by some of his misogynistic YouTube videos, made a call that resulted in the police visiting Rodger. The headline from that meeting was that Rodger, seemingly calm and collected, easily deflected the police’s attention. But there was surely a subtext: How worried — how desperate, really — must a mother be to believe the police should be called on her own son?
We also learned that on the day of his murderous rampage, his mother, having read the first few lines of his “manifesto,” had phoned his father, from whom she was divorced. In separate cars, they raced from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara hoping to stop what they feared was about to happen.
And then, on Monday, in a remarkably detailed article in The New York Times, we learned the rest of it. How Rodger was clearly a troubled soul before he even turned 8 years old. How his parents’ concern about his mental health was like a “shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life.”
Constantly bullied and unable to fit in, he went through three high schools. In college, he tried to throw a girl off a ledge at a party — and was beaten up. (“I’m going to kill them,” he said to a neighbor afterward.) He finally retreated to some Internet sites that “drew sexually frustrated young men,” according to The Times.
Throughout, said one person who knew Rodger, “his mom did everything she could to help Elliot.” But what his parents never did was the one thing that might have prevented him from buying a gun: have him committed to a psychiatric facility. California’s tough gun laws notwithstanding, a background check would have caught him only if he had had in-patient mental health treatment, made a serious threat to an identifiable victim in the presence of a therapist, or had a criminal record. He had none of the above.
Should his parents have taken more steps to have him treated? Could they have? It is awfully hard to say, even in retrospect. On the one hand, there were plainly people who knew him who feared that he might someday harm others. On the other hand, those people weren’t psychiatrists. He was a loner, a misfit, whose parents were more fearful of how the world would treat their son than how their son would treat the world. And his mother, after all, did reach out for help, and the police responded and decided they had no cause to arrest him or even search his room, where his guns were hidden.
Once again, a mass killing has triggered calls for doing something to keep guns away from the mentally ill. And, once again, the realities of the situation convey how difficult a task that is. There are, after all, plenty of young, male, alienated loners — the now-standard description of mass shooters — but very few of them become killers.
And you can’t go around committing them all because a tiny handful might turn out to be killers. Indeed, the law is very clear on this point. In 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that nondangerous mentally ill people can’t be confined against their will if they can function without confinement. “In California, the bar is very high for people like Elliot,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center. In a sense, California’s commitment to freedom for the mentally ill conflicts with its background-check law.
Torrey believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge.
In this, however, he is an outlier. The mainstream sentiment among mental health professionals is that there is no going back to the bad-old days when people who were capable of living on their own were locked up for years in mental hospitals. The truth is, the kind of symptoms Elliot Rodger showed were unlikely to get him confined in any case. And without a history of confinement, he had every legal right to buy a gun.
You read the stories about Elliot Rodger and it is easy to think: If this guy, with all his obvious problems, can slip through the cracks, then what hope is there of ever stopping mass shootings?
But, of course, there is another way of thinking about this. Instead of focusing on making it harder for the mentally ill to get guns, maybe we should be making it harder to get guns, period. Something to consider before the next mass shooting.
By: Joe Nocera, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 2, 2014
“The NRA Game Plan”: Blame Violence On Anything But Guns
The NRA will let one week go by and then they’ll issue a statement about the Elliot Rodger shootings in Santa Barbara. Actually, they’ll issue two statements which they always have ready to go. First they’ll say that the slaughter shows that the mental health system is ‘broken’ and needs to be ‘fixed.’ Then they’ll say that a ‘good guy’ with a gun would have stopped the ‘bad guy,’ and they’ll remind everyone that Concealed Carry Weapons (CCW) legislation is impossible to get in California so there are no ‘good guys’ walking around in Isla Vista anyway.
The truth is that neither statement is true and or ever been true. But they sound like they’re true, which gets the NRA off the hook. They can promote gun sales all they want but also come down on the side of safety and responsibility because it’s the mental health system that needs to be fixed, right?
Last week Dr. Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry, explained that the link between mental illness and violence is tenuous at best and accounts for less than 5% of overall violence at worst. Which means that if every nut lost his guns, the 10,000+ gun homicides we endure each year would drop by a whole, big 500 or so. Wow — talk about ending gun violence by ‘fixing’ the mental health system. Some fix.
As for all those ‘good guys’ walking around with guns, the FBI says there are roughly 300 justifiable homicides each year, a number that hasn’t changed even with the CCW upsurge in the past year. Yeah, yeah, every year armed citizens ‘prevent’ millions of crimes just by waving their guns around in the air. I also know that Martians actually did land in Parrump.
The self-satisfied folks who really believe that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’ simply refuse to accept the fact that if you pick up a gun, point it at someone else and pull the trigger, that the result is going to be very serious injuries or loss of life. There is no other way, including running over someone with a car, that has such a devastating effect. The NRA gets around that problem by promoting, with an almost mystical reverence, the notion of using guns for self defense. John Lott’s nonsense to the contrary, there is absolutely no evidence which proves that guns save more lives than they destroy.
Now don’t get me wrong. If you’re already sending a comment about how Mike The Gun Guy is really Mike The Anti-Gun Guy, why don’t you save the HP comment screeners a little time and at least wait until you read this entire blog? Because believe it or not, I’m not anti-gun. I have said again and again that 99.9% of all gun owners are safe and responsible with their guns. I have also said, but it bears repeating, that we should be able to figure out how to end gun violence without making lawful and careful gun owners jump through more legal hoops, including expanded background checks.
This morning I received an email from one of the largest internet gun-sellers who is dumping new, name-brand AR-15s for under 600 bucks. These are guns that were selling for twice that much a year ago and, as the email warned, “any sudden media attention to political situations, restrictive laws and regulations can drive prices through the roof again overnight.”
The gun industry sits on the horns of a dilemma. They can moan and groan all they want about gun control but it is high-profile shootings that ignite the debate which then leads to stronger sales. The NRA claims that it’s all about safe gun ownership but let’s not make it too safe. Because if we do, it will be more than just a couple of Tea Party politicians giving away free AR-15s.
By: Mike Weisser, The Huffington Post Blog, June 2, 2014
“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
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 