“It’s A Whole Different Issue”: John Boehner, Willfull Ignorance Or Willful Lying?
The day after this week’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Army Secretary John McHugh said the gunman lived off post and was therefore not required to register his weapon with the military.
McHugh told senators yesterday, “We try to do everything we can to encourage soldiers to register their personal weapons, even when they live off post. We are not legally able to compel them to register weapons when they reside off post.”
Soon after, during House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) press conference, a reporter noted McHugh’s comments and asked the House leader whether this is an issue Congress should address. Boehner replied:
“Well, there’s no question that those with mental health issues should be prevented from owning weapons or being able to purchase weapons. In the so-called ‘doc fix’ that passed here, there was funding for a pilot project dealing with mental health issues and weapons from both the Senate side and the House side. There are two programs that are being funded in there. The bill went to the president yesterday. This issue we need to continue to look at to find a way to keep weapons out of the hands of people who should not have them.”
The “doc fix” bill related to Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians, but it’s always a pretty big bill with plenty of unrelated provisions. This year, there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding how the bill passed – House GOP leaders played a fast one on their own members and conservatives were right to be annoyed – but I never heard a word about funding for a pilot project dealing with mental health issues and firearms.
And that’s surprising. Usually, any federal measure related in any way to gun ownership is the subject of considerable scrutiny. But there was the House Speaker yesterday, assuring the public in the wake of another mass shooting that lawmakers just acted on a policy related to gun violence and mental health.
It’s enough to make one wonder: does the provision Boehner referenced actually exist?
Roll Call reports this morning that according to the lawmaker who wrote the measure, no, it doesn’t.
Speaker John A. Boehner Thursday morning said that Congress had recently passed a provision to address whether people with mental health issues have access to weapons, but the measure’s Republican author said his bill actually does nothing of the sort.
Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., told CQ-Roll Call that despite Boehner’s assertion, his measure to incentivize outpatient treatment for mental health issues has nothing to do with keeping guns out of the hands of the severely mentally ill.
“Not our bill, no. It’s a whole different issue,” Murphy told Roll Call. “I think he confused that. When he said that it dealt with it, I think he confused that.”
I checked the text of the legislation itself and it includes no references to gun, weapons, or firearms.
Murphy went on to say, “What this provision that I had in there allows in states is an outpatient treatment for patients who have a risk of past incarceration or past multiple hospitalizations where they were a safety risk, to work to say, ‘We need to get you back in treatment, get your life back together.’ That does not necessarily preclude or affect anything about a person’s ability to own a gun, unless they also have a history of being put in against their will.”
When Boehner says Congress just approved a project “dealing with mental health issues and weapons,” he appears to be wrong.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 3, 2014
“Are Guns A Public Health Issue?”: Let Us Count The Ways…
Is calling guns a public health issue a political statement? That’s become the underlying issue in the nomination of the White House’s pick for surgeon general, Vivek Murthy. In 2012, Murthy sent out a tweet: “Tired of politicians playing politics w/ guns, putting lives at risk b/c they’re scared of NRA. Guns are a health care issue.” The NRA got Senators to hurl the words back at him during a confirmation hearing, and seems to have convinced not just Republicans but some Democrats to vote against him. Now nobody is talking about bringing his nomination to the floor.
Let’s leave aside the issue of whether a Tweet should be the grounds for an opposition campaign, and of whether Murthy, best known for running an advocacy organization to support Obamacare’s launch, is the most qualified person for the job. If the question at hand is whether it’s partisan to believe that gun violence should be under the purview of the nation’s top doctor, it seems the answer is no. As Lucia Graves at National Journal chronicled last week, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush’s surgeon generals, C. Everett Koop and Louis W. Sullivan, have professed the same view as Murthy without ruffling feathers. “Promoting reasonable gun policies does not make [public health professionals] ‘antigun’ any more than the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is ‘anticar,’” wrote David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health in his 2004 book Private Guns, Public Health.
Gun violence impacts health in all kinds of ways. There are the more obvious ones, like death and injury. As Olga Khazan pointed out at The Atlantic, suicide rates are higher in states where gun ownership is more common. In 2010, 19,392 people took their own lives with guns, while “justifiable homicides”—self-defense shootings that may have saved a life—numbered only 230. Over two-thirds of homicides and over half of successful suicides involve the use of a gun, and accidental gun deaths average about two a day. The U.S. spends $2 billion a year on medical care for victims of gun injuries; one out of three people hospitalized after shootings is uninsured, according to The Huffington Post.
Then there are the less obvious health effects of gun violence: Lead in the ground from ammunition. Loss of hearing from gunshots. Widespread PTSD that effects everyone from shooters, to victims, to bystanders. “Gun violence traumatizes whole communities,” Hemenway told me. This creates a cycle: “People with PTSD in inner cities often don’t have good access to mental health care, and it makes them more likely to be aggressive.”
Public health experts have a list of possible solutions that fall outside the most fractious debates over firearms. Stephen Teret, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, has pushed for the engineering of “smart guns,” which could only be fired by their owners: No more weapons finding their way into the black market, or becoming deadly playthings in the hands of children. (The NRA has fought the new technology.) Teret’s idea would address both intentional and accidental gun hazards, but there are lots of ways to approach the latter—from mandated child safety locks, to features that would make it more obvious if a weapon was loaded.
Hemenway also suggested changing the culture around some aspects of gun use, as a sustained campaign did for drunk driving in the 20th century. “One of the social norms should be that it’s your responsibility, if you’re a gun owner, to make sure your gun is not stolen,” he said.
The power of the surgeon general lies mostly in the ability to shape public conversation, and to do so he or she needs to maintain a high degree of trust, on both ends of the political spectrum. But sometimes advocating for public health means wading into controversial issues, like AIDS or smoking, because people’s lives are at stake. That means a surgeon general must be ready and willing to speak out on all kinds of hazards, even ones with powerful constituencies behind them. Those can include carcinogens from cigarettes, poisons from pollution, and, yes, bullets from guns.
By: Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New Republic, April 3, 2014
“Racial Fears, Gun Fantasies, And Another Dead Teenager”: Real Action Hero’s, Standing Between America And Disaster
Among the arguments I’ve made about the troubling aspects of American gun culture is the way so many gun owners have in their heads a dangerous fantasy about what the world is like and what role they play in that world. The people I’m talking about, the ones who think it’s terribly important that they be able to bring their firearms into any store or coffee shop or church they might visit, believe that every moment of every day in every place they go is nothing more than a violent situation just waiting to happen. Will they be there to stop a mass shooting at the Safeway? Will they be walking down the street and come upon a group of heavily armed thieves taking down an armored truck? Will they encounter an al-Qaeda strike team at the Starbucks, and this 50-year-old insurance salesman with a concealed carry license will be the only thing that stands between America and disaster? They sure seem to think so.
Is that all gun owners? Of course not. It’s not even most gun owners. But it’s lots of them, and I think it comes through in the case of Michael Dunn, the Florida (of course) man who got into an argument with some teenagers outside a convenience store over the teens’ loud music, and ended the argument by firing 10 shots into their car, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis. This case includes some rather remarkable statements about black people from Michael Dunn, which we’ll get to in a moment. But I think it’s the way race and the gun owner’s fantasy come together that produced this tragedy.
The basic facts are that Dunn and his fiancée pulled into a convenience store, where she went inside and he stayed outside. Dunn then got into an argument with four teenagers in another car over the volume of the music they were playing; the argument escalated, and eventually Dunn took out his gun and fired ten shots, killing Jordan Davis, one of the teens. Dunn claims that he saw a shotgun, or maybe a pipe, emerge from the teens’ car, so he had no choice but to defend himself. No such gun or pipe was ever found. That part of his story was also contradicted by his fiancée, who testified that afterward he said nothing to her about them having a gun. Dunn also says that Davis got out of the car and approached him, but that part of his story was contradicted by the medical examiner, who testified that Davis’s wounds were not consistent with someone who was standing up, but rather appeared to have been sustained while he was sitting in the car.
I can’t say with certainty what happened that day. As a liberal, is my bias to believe the gun-toting white adult was at fault and not the dead black teenager? Yes it is. But there are some good reasons to think that when Dunn got into an argument with a bunch of black kids over their music (“rap crap,” as he called it during his testimony yesterday), he was particularly inclined to assume they’d try to kill him at any moment, because that’s how those people are. While in jail awaiting trial, Dunn wrote letters to his family that said, among other things, “It’s spooky how racist everyone is up here and how biased toward blacks the courts are. This jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs.” When he says “racist” in that letter, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about bias against black people. He also wrote, “This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these **** idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”
That doesn’t sound like a man who’s “crazy with grief,” as he testified he was over the shooting. But it gets worse. On a web site set up by Dunn’s supporters, the defendant writes this:
I am sorry for the tragic outcome of that night in Jacksonville and the loss of Davis’ son [sic]. But I would offer that, rather than rail against the “Stand Your Ground” laws, people take a look at the violence and lifestyle that the “Gangsta Rap” music and the ‘”thug life” promote. The jails are chock full of young black men – and so are the cemeteries. Gun laws have nothing to do with it. The violent sub-cultures that so many young men become enthralled with are destroying an entire generation. Root cause analysis says to correct the behavior. The black community needs to do a better job of selling worthwhile role models. Most importantly, young men need to know that they are not just risking jail time when they threaten the lives of others… they’re risking their very own lives.
Just to repeat, this is something Michael Dunn himself wrote. How is it possible to read that as anything other than, “That n***er had it coming”?
There was another detail of his testimony yesterday that stuck out to me. This is from the New York Times report:
As the Durango backed up quickly to elude the gunfire, Mr. Dunn stepped out of his own car, dropped to one knee and fired more volleys to thwart any ‘blind fire,’ or wild, random shooting out the car window, he said.
At that point, he said, his mind was on his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, who was about to walk out of the convenience store. ‘I did it in my panicked state,’ he said, of the later volleys. ‘I was worried about the blind firing situation, where they would shoot over their heads, whatever, and hit me, or hit me and Rhonda.’
So the car is pulling away to elude his gunfire, and Dunn immediately considers the “blind fire” scenario, just like he’s read about in his gun magazines (or somewhere, anyway). He drops to a stable firing stance, then pumps shot after shot into the car. He saved the day—he’s not a 47-year-old software engineer, he’s a real action hero!
Gun owners argue that carrying a weapon makes you less likely to escalate a confrontation, since you know it could turn deadly. And I’m sure that for many of them, that’s true. But for others, after spending all that time at the range, after all the fantasizing about the day when they get to act out the things they’ve seen on screen, when a confrontation happens, instead of doing the things smart people do to make violence less likely, they think Bring it on. I’m ready. So when you get into an argument with some black kids about loud music, you’re sure that at any moment there’s going to be an exchange of fire, because those thugs probably brought a shotgun down to the convenience store, and you’d better fire first. Some guy won’t stop texting during the previews of a movie, and gets pissed when you tell him to stop? Better have your hand on your weapon just in case, and when he throws popcorn at you, you shoot him in the chest. That’s what a man has to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 12, 2014
“In The Name Of Freedom”: How To Spot A Paranoid Libertarian
In a recent essay in the New Republic, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz contends that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange reflect a political impulse he calls “paranoid libertarianism.” Wilentz claims that far from being “truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors,” they “despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”
Wilentz gives credit to Richard Hofstadter for the term “paranoid libertarianism,” but he is being generous. Although Hofstadter wrote an influential essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he didn’t call special attention to its libertarian manifestation. Wilentz has performed an important public service in doing exactly that.
Most of Wilentz’s essay focuses on Snowden, Greenwald and Assange, and he offers a lot of details in an effort to support his conclusions about each of them. But let’s put the particular individuals to one side. Although Wilentz doesn’t say much about paranoid libertarianism as such, the general category is worth some investigation.
It can be found on the political right, in familiar objections to gun control, progressive taxation, environmental protection and health care reform. It can also be found on the left, in familiar objections to religious displays at public institutions and to efforts to reduce the risk of terrorism. Whether on the right or the left, paranoid libertarianism (which should of course be distinguished from libertarianism as such) is marked by five defining characteristics.
The first is a wildly exaggerated sense of risks — a belief that if government is engaging in certain action (such as surveillance or gun control), it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself. In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.
The second characteristic is a presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials — a belief that their motivations must be distrusted. If, for example, officials at a state university sponsor a Christian prayer at a graduation ceremony, the problem is that they don’t believe in religious liberty at all (and thus seek to eliminate it). If officials are seeking to impose new restrictions on those who seek to purchase guns, the “real” reason is that they seek to ban gun ownership (and thus to disarm the citizenry).
The third characteristic is a sense of past, present or future victimization. Paranoid libertarians tend to believe that as individuals or as members of specified groups, they are being targeted by the government, or will be targeted imminently, or will be targeted as soon as officials have the opportunity to target them. Any evidence of victimization, however speculative or remote, is taken as vindication, and is sometimes even welcome. (Of course, some people, such as Snowden, are being targeted, because they appear to have committed crimes.)
The fourth characteristic is an indifference to tradeoffs — a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides. Wilentz emphasizes what he regards as the national- security benefits of some forms of surveillance; paranoid libertarians tend to see such arguments as a sham. Similarly, paranoid libertarians tend to dismiss the benefits of other measures that they despise, including gun control and environmental regulation.
The fifth and final characteristic is passionate enthusiasm for slippery-slope arguments. The fear is that if government is allowed to take an apparently modest step today, it will take far less modest steps tomorrow, and on the next day, freedom itself will be in terrible trouble. Modest and apparently reasonable steps must be resisted as if they were the incarnation of tyranny itself.
In some times and places, the threats are real, and paranoid libertarians turn out to be right. As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Societies can benefit a lot from paranoid libertarians. Even if their apocalyptic warnings are wildly overstated, they might draw attention to genuine risks, or at least improve public discussion. But as a general rule, paranoia isn’t a good foundation for public policy, even if it operates in freedom’s name.
By: Cass Sunstein, The National Memo, January 30, 2014
“The Only Card They Have To Play”: What Can Republicans Do If Obamacare Isn’t A Disaster?
As the 2014 midterms draw nearer, the Republican Party has developed a simple, Costanza-esque plan for the election season: Nothing.
The theory, which is reportedly being pushed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) over the objections of some House members, goes as follows: As the rollout of the Affordable Care Act continues, Republicans should fade to the background and watch it “collapse under its own weight,” as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is prone to saying. That will allow Republicans to eliminate any distractions as they relentlessly hammer Democrats over the law’s failures, on the way to maintaining their House majority and winning the net six seats needed to take control of the Senate.
The Republican strategy makes some sense on its face — after all, no issue fires up Republican loyalists quite like the Affordable Care Act, and there’s no question that the law’s troubled rollout has been a massive political headache for Democrats.
But there’s a question that should keep every Republican strategist up at night: What happens if health care reform isn’t the electoral albatross that Republicans assume?
It’s not an unrealistic proposition. After all, despite the massively publicized problems with the launch of the law, the percentage of Americans who want it scaled back or repealed has hardly changed over the past two years. There are more reasons to be optimistic that the law will work as intended than there have been at any point since its rollout. Americans still have no faith in the Republican Party to create a constructive alternative. And, crucially, at least one poll suggests that the public is more concerned with job creation, gun reform, and immigration reform — bread-and-butter issues for Democrats — than with reducing the deficit or repealing Obamacare (the central tenets of the GOP platform, such as it exists).
In fact, according to the final Democracy Corps battleground survey of 2013, Republicans may actually pay a political price for their unyielding attacks on the health care reform law. As pollster Erica Seifert put it, “battling on Obamacare is [Republicans’] weakest case for re-election. In fact, it undermines it.”
So if the Affordable Care Act doesn’t crash and burn, destroying the Democratic Party with it, what is the Republican Party’s plan B?
It appears that their guess is as good as yours.
Speaker Boehner has reportedly been trumpeting the results of a recent survey finding that the public now primarily blames President Obama for the nation’s economic problems, rather than the policies of his predecessor.
“Since he can’t blame George W. Bush anymore, the president has chosen to talk about rising income inequality, unemployment, and the need to extend emergency unemployment benefits,” Boehner told House Republicans, according to The Hill. “After five years in office, Barack Obama still doesn’t have an answer to the question: Where are the jobs?”
The problem for Boehner is twofold: First, Americans very clearly want to have the conversation that President Obama has begun. Second, if Republicans have an answer to the “where are the jobs?” question, they are keeping it awfully close to the vest.
The Republican Party’s official “Plan for Economic Growth & Jobs” is incredibly thin on details. In fact, with the exception of repealing Obamacare — and replacing it with yet-undefined “patient-centered reforms” — it does not offer a single specific policy prescription. (By contrast, the White House jobs page leads directly to a description of the American Jobs Act, which, regardless of what one thinks of its merits, is undisputably an actual plan.)
The GOP has similar problems discussing other top issues of the day. Tacit in Boehner’s barb about President Obama “distracting” Americans with a discussion of inequality is the fact that Republicans have few productive ideas to add to the conversation. Immigration reform is similarly treacherous territory for the party. As is any conversation on “reforming” Social Security or Medicare.
It’s not as though Republicans aren’t aware of the issue; after the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee made a concerted effort to change its image from that of a party that’s only “talking to itself” (it has not been going well, by the way).
Perhaps in an attempt to fill out its pitch to voters, on Thursday the Republican National Committee tweeted a link to a “campaign strategy survey,” urging its followers to “tell us your top issues” so the party can “win big in 2014.”
In a reflection of the party’s priorities, however, question one — “Which of the following should be the top priority for the Republican Party in the next 18 months?” — offers a choice between “Elect principled conservatives to the U.S. House and U.S. Senate,” “Rally a grassroots movement,” “Stop the liberal agenda by defeating Democrats,” and “Unite the party.” In other words, the “strategy” isn’t exactly technocratic.
It’s entirely possible that Republican predictions are right, and merely opposing Democrats — with a specific focus on their health care reforms — will be enough to carry them through the midterm elections. After all, the map and the electorate (which history suggests will be smaller, older, and whiter than 2012) favor the GOP. But if they’re wrong, and Obamacare does not ruin the Democrats, then Republicans could be in serious trouble. Because unless they have a major surprise up their sleeves, this is the only card they have to play.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 17, 2014
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