“The Book Of Cons, 3:16”: God Wants You To Have An Assault Rifle
Legislation aimed at reducing gun violence is “a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society,” according to an article published in the leading conservative opinion journal National Review.
The author, David French, interprets the Christian Bible as granting everyone a right to self-defense. He suggests that this, if true, means that God’s will is that people have access to guns, as they are the means for self defense:
In fact, Jesus’s disciples carried swords, and Jesus even said in some contexts the unarmed should arm themselves…What does all this mean? Essentially that gun control represents not merely a limitation on a constitutional right but a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society. All rights — of course — are subject to some limits (the right of free speech is not unlimited, for example), and there is much room for debate on the extent of those limits, but state action against the right of self-defense is by default a violation of the natural rights of man, and the state’s political judgment about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism and must overcome a heavy burden of justification.
Even if French is right about the Christian view of self-defense (though Jesus did have choice words about “turning the other cheek“), it’s a logical fallacy to say this implies anything about restrictions on access to guns. Saying that people have a right to defend themselves if attacked isn’t the same thing as saying they should have a right to possess any conceivable means of defending themselves – presumably, French is fine with banning grenade launchers. The burden, instead, is on French to prove that universal background checks or limitations on assault weapon ownership somehow prevent people from defending themselves; to prove, in other words, that gun regulation is actually a restriction on the right of self-defense proper rather than a crime-prevention statute.
Moreover, French is wrong about the role of “self-defense” in a democracy. He cites John Locke, enlightenment philosopher and inspiration for the American Revolution, to suggest that gun rights are “fundamental rights of nature.” But as Ari Kohen, a professor of political theory at the University of Nebraska, points out, French radically misinterprets Locke:
But for people to establish a political community, Locke asserts that people must give up to the government their natural right to punish criminal behavior and agree to have the government settle grievances. This is why we have standing laws that are meant to be applied equally by independent officers of the law and by the courts.
Locke, as Kohen says, held that our right to use force was necessarily limited by the creation of legitimate government — that’s why we have police. This means that the government can limit access to certain weapons as means of discharging its responsibility to keep the peace. While the government may not be able to legitimately ban you from say, killing a home invader who’s brandishing a gun, it also can take reasonable steps to prevent criminals from being able to threaten you with arms in the first place without having to overcome a “heavy burden of justification.”
This isn’t the first questionable gun piece published in National Review. After the Newtown shooting, its editors suggested that mass school shootings were the price we pay for the Second Amendment. One of its writers, Charlotte Allen, infamously wrote that the Newtown massacre happened because there were too many female teachers.
By: Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress, January 28, 2013
“Two Different America’s”: Fighting Firearms With Firearms
On Saturday, just a few days after President Obama put forth 23 executive actions to curb gun violence, approximately 1,000 gun-rights activists gathered at the Texas state Capitol to show their opposition. The protest was one of 49 organized around the country by pro-gun group Guns Across America, but the one in Texas was among the biggest. Signs pronounced assault weapons “the modern musket” and quoted the Second Amendment. Speakers including Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and state Representative Steve Toth argued that gun control had no place in America. “The Second Amendment was an enumeration of a right that I already had received from God,” speaker Ralph Patterson, the McLennan County Republican Party chair, told the crowd. “God gave me the right to defend myself.”
Three days after the rally, on Tuesday, Texas was in the national headlines when a shooting occurred at a Houston community college. After the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado, and Oak Creek, Wisconsin, some feared the worst. Instead, it turned out the case was a dispute between two men, at least one of whom was armed. Three people were wounded; fortunately, none died.
To gun-control advocates, the incident in Houston was yet another reason why federal and state governments need to tamp down on gun availability. But in Texas, lawmakers were arguing just the opposite. For many of them, there’s only one answer to gun violence: more guns. That night, after the shooting, state Senator Dan Patrick, a powerful figure on the state’s far right, went on Anderson Cooper 360 and pushed for a proposed bill to let those 21 and older get concealed handgun licenses to carry guns on campuses. “I don’t think a lot of people in the mainstream media and maybe back east understand Texas,” he said. According to Patrick, the shooting “only re-emphasizes the issue that people must have a right to defend themselves.”
Nationally, the mass shootings in 2012, ending with the particularly horrifying death toll at Sandy Hook Elementary School, sparked a renewed push for gun control. The president’s proposals include beefing up requirements for buying guns, reinstating a federal assault weapons ban, and banning certain types of ammunition. Meanwhile, lawmakers in a number of states are proposing their own measures; New York has already passed a law expanding a ban on assault weapons and reducing the allowable size of gun magazines to seven rounds.
In the other America, however, the mass shootings have only exacerbated an ongoing effort to make guns more prevalent and accessible—particularly in schools. Texas lawmakers have been among the most visible, staking out a position far to the right of the national conversation. For the third session in a row, pro-gun lawmakers like Patrick will push a measure to allow concealed handguns on college campuses, a measure Texas Governor Rick Perry has also supported. Another proposal would designate school employees with special training to be armed; it’s modeled on the federal air-marshal program, in which a plain-clothed air marshal may be riding a plane armed. The lieutenant governor is pushing for the state to fund gun-training sessions for teachers and school employees. There’s also a bill that bars state officials from enforcing federal gun-control laws. The law may not carry much practical weight—federal laws trump state ones—but it gets the point across.
Texas has a legendary affinity for guns. But it’s hardly unique. Eight states already allow concealed handguns on college campuses and, like Texas, Indiana and Arkansas are considering similar legislation this year. Arkansas and North Dakota have proposals to allow people to carry concealed handguns into churches. Seven states—Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and even Arizona, the same state where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with 18 others two years ago—have proposals similar to Texas’s to ban enforcement of federal gun laws. Arizona is also one of six states where lawmakers have proposed measures to exempt guns produced in-state from federal restrictions.
In most of these gun-crazy states, there’s little to no discussion of measures that would regulate gun ownership or restrict the types of guns and ammunition available. That, the logic goes, would only leave the “good guys” defenseless and vulnerable since criminals will access weapons regardless of the law. Instead, the answer to gun violence is almost always more guns. That way, individuals can take charge of the situation, protect themselves and maybe even take down the shooter. People are considered less likely to attack someone if that someone might be carrying a concealed weapon. Among those further on the fringe, the “protection” rhetoric gets even more intense: Without unfettered access to guns, they say (or yell), people cannot protect themselves from evil forces, including the government.
If you want to see evidence of polarization in the country, just look at gun laws. In one America, mass shootings lead to new restrictions; in the other America, the same shootings lead to fewer restrictions. After years of gun policy drifting further to the right, any move to move the law back toward the center (or further left) is immediately branded as extreme, if not unthinkable.
Ronald Reagan championed the assault-weapons ban that Obama is proposing to reinstate and expand. But these days, the pro-gun lobby is far more absolutist. For those who believe gun violence will decrease as the number of guns decreases, the situation is bleak unless there’s a federal action. So long as states like Texas and Arizona continue to make automatic weapons and military-grade ammunition available, those firearms being manufactured can easily find their way to states like New York, in spite of their stricter gun laws.
The striking number of mass shootings in 2012—coupled with concerns about the general level of gun violence in the country—has left many open to more gun restrictions. But while the number of true NRA believers may have dwindled (it’s hard to say for sure), those that remain are just as hardcore as ever. In Illinois and Wisconsin, where legislators were considering some limits to gun ownership, the NRA flexed its muscle, as members flooded the state capitols with calls and emails opposing the measures. In both cases, the lawmakers backed off.
On Tuesday—the same day of the shooting in Houston—three Texas lawmakers announced a different kind of proposal to make schools safer. The Texas School District Safety Act would create special taxing districts to pay for additional security, including guards and metal detectors. This might pass for middle ground; it allows school districts to make the decisions and would at least offer money to pay for armed professionals, rather than the cheaper option of arming teachers. But don’t think for a minute that metal detectors will automatically keep out guns.
After all, when the Texas Capitol building put metal detectors at entryways in 2011, there was one caveat: Those with a concealed handgun permits could skip the security line and the search and enter armed. In this America, guns are the only guarantee of safefy; it’s only the lack of guns that make people unsafe. It will take a lot more than Newtown, or many more Newtowns, to change that mentality.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, January 25, 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
“A Lesson From The Inauguration”: When Everything Is Partisan, Just Do What’s Right
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Republicans started complaining that President Obama’s second inaugural address was too “partisan” and lacked “outreach” across the aisle. But who was left out? What did they find “partisan”? The acknowledgement of climate science? The idea that women should receive equal pay for equal work? The nod to civil rights struggles of our past and present? The hope that no American will have to wait in hours-long lines to vote? The defense of the existence of a social safety net? The determination to offer support to the victims of a historic storm and to find real answers to the epidemic of mass shootings? In the not-too-distant past, none of these would have raised eyebrows except on the very, very far right. But I guess that’s the point: what was once the radical fringe is now in control of the Grand Old Party.
In many ways, Monday’s inauguration ceremony was a Tea Party Republican’s nightmare-come-true. The openly gay poet. The Spanish sprinkled into the benediction. The one-two-three punch of “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.” It was the embodiment of all that the far right has tried to wall itself off from as the country begins to include more and more of the real America in its democracy.
What would have pleased this faction, short of winning the presidential election? I imagine they would have preferred a paean to the America of their imaginations — where the founders were flawless and prescient about the right to bear assault weapons and the Constitution was delivered, amendments included, directly from God; where there are no gay people or only silent ones, where the world is not getting warmer; where there have been no struggles in the process of forging a more perfect union. This, of course, would have been its very own kind of political statement — and one that was just rejected by the majority of American voters.
If embracing America as it is rather than as a shimmery vision of what it never was constitutes partisanship, and if it turns off people who cling to that dishonest vision, let’s have more of it.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, January 24, 2013
“Complete Ignorance”: Does Rush Limbaugh Think Civil Rights Activists Should Have Shot Cops?
Under the guidance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the practice of nonviolence was an historic cornerstone of the American civil rights movement. Writing in 1966, Dr. King affirmed, “I am convinced that for practical as well as moral reasons, nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people.”
But last week, spinning on behalf of gun advocates and continuing the far-right’s convoluted attempt to equate Second Amendment supporters to modern-day civil rights protesters, Rush Limbaugh suggested that if civil rights activists had brandished guns maybe the movement could have better protected itself from segregationist foes [emphasis added]:
LIMBAUGH: If a lot of African-Americans back in the ’60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? I don’t know. I’m just asking. If (Rep) John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?
Basically Limbaugh, stretching to make an absurd point about guns in America, suggested it would have been better if Dr. King’s non-violent crusade had embraced firearms as a way to advance its cause.
Specifically, the right-wing talker wondered if civil rights icon John Lewis had been carrying a gun on March 7, 1965, would Lewis still have been beaten when he led 600 unarmed activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. (aka “Bloody Sunday.”)
Not only is the gun suggestion an insult to the non-violent philosophy that Dr. King preached in the name of social justice, but it also highlights Limbaugh’s complete ignorance about the civil rights movement and who was handing out the beatings at the time. As Lewis noted while responding to Limbaugh’s comments last week, “Violence begets violence, and we believed the only way to achieve peaceful ends was through peaceful means.”
Fact: The people attacking black activists that day in Selma were Alabama state troopers. If, as Limbaugh suggested, Lewis had a gun and was willing to use it against his aggressors, if he had fired in “self-defense” after troopers charged into the crowd of peaceful protesters, that would have meant Lewis spraying bullets into a crowd of white policemen.
One can only imagine what the repercussions would have been in segregated Alabama, in 1965, and what that would have done to the cause of civil rights in the South.
Limbaugh and others are going so far around the bend trying to argue the benefits of guns and how virtually all Americans should be armed, that they’re producing historic scenarios that most people (and especially Limbaugh) would have treated as radical and revolutionary. Like civil rights marchers opening fire on policemen in 1965. (Or the idea that gun-toting African-Americans could have eradicated slavery centuries ago.)
Also, note that by telling listeners Lewis “says he was beat upside the head” during the Selma protest (emphasis on his use of “says”), Limbaugh seemed to indicate the point was open to debate or interpretation. However, this famous news photograph showing Lewis knocked to the ground in Selma and being beaten by an Alabama state trooper leaves no doubt as to what happened that day.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Huffington Post, January 22, 2013
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