“Influence Game”: NRA Putting Its Stamp On Another Branch Of Government
The National Rifle Association has enjoyed high-profile success over the years in shaping gun-rights legislation in Congress and statehouses, in part by campaigning to defeat lawmakers who defied the group.
Now, the NRA has added a lesser-known strategy to protect its interests: opposing President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees whom it sees as likely to enforce gun-control laws. In some cases, the group’s opposition has kept jobs on federal benches unfilled.
Still in its early stages, the effort is a safety net to ensure that federal courthouses are stocked with judges who are friendly to gun rights, should gun restrictions somehow get through the group’s first line of defense on Capitol Hill. The NRA also weighs in on state judicial elections and appointments, another fail-safe if the massacre of young children at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school leads to tighter gun-control measures.
A case study in the group’s approach across the country can be found in its opposition to the nominations of the two most recent Supreme Court justices.
The NRA opposed both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan and warned its allies in Congress that their votes to confirm each would be held against them.
In a letter to lawmakers, the NRA wrote: “In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, (Kagan) refused to declare support for the Second Amendment, saying only that the matter was ‘settled law.’ This was eerily similar to the scripted testimony of Justice Sonia Sotomayor last year, prior to her confirmation to the court. It has become obvious that ‘settled law’ is the scripted code of an anti-gun nominee’s confirmation effort.”
It added, “The NRA is not fooled.”
The group had limited evidence to back up its claims that the two were opposed to gun rights. It pointed to a one-paragraph memo Kagan wrote in 1987 to Justice Thurgood Marshall that suggested she was not sympathetic to gun owners, and to her time as a lawyer in the Clinton administration as it sought to put tighter gun controls in place. For Sotomayor, critics cited a ruling that upheld New York’s ban on nunchucks, a martial arts weapon that has nothing to do with firearms.
Even some pro-gun-rights lawmakers bristled at the NRA inserting itself into judicial confirmation battles.
“I am a bit concerned that the NRA weighed in and said they were going to score this. I don’t think that was appropriate,” Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said at the time. “A vote on a Supreme Court justice, in my mind, should be free from those political interest groups that are going to pressure you.”
But, like most Republicans, she still voted against confirming both nominees, likely for reasons beyond the gun issue.
Only seven GOP senators voted for Sotomayor in 2009 and, a year later, only five Republicans voted for Kagan.
Among those who supported both was Sen. Richard Lugar, a six-term Indiana Republican who lost his seat last year in a primary.
The NRA exacted its revenge in that race, spending $200,000 against him in order to help GOP challenger Richard Mourdock.
“Dick Lugar has changed. He’s become the only Republican candidate in Indiana with an F rating from the NRA,” the group said in one TV ad. The group also warned allies that Lugar voted to confirm “both of Barack Obama’s anti-gun nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Last spring, the group opposed the nomination of Elissa Cadish to the federal bench in Nevada and worked with Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada to block it.
In 2008, while running for a district court position in Nevada, Cadish replied on an election-year survey that “I do not believe that there is this constitutional right” to guns. She added, however, “Of course, I will enforce the laws as they exist as a judge.”
Cadish completed the Citizens for Responsible Government questionnaire before the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protected a citizen’s right to have firearms in the District of Columbia and before a 2010 case that gave the same rights to citizens who live in the states.
Four years later, when Obama nominated her to a federal bench, she faced questions about those views and sought to clarify her position in a letter to her state’s other senator, Harry Reid.
“I want to assure you that I was not giving my personal opinion on this question,” Cadish said. “Rather, this response was based on my understanding of the state of federal law at the time.”
The NRA questioned the sincerity of Cadish’s statement.
“While she has more recently tried to backtrack from that statement, her ‘new’ position is of little comfort to gun owners,” NRA executive director Chris Cox wrote to Heller in April.
In the months that followed, the NRA and its affiliated groups spent $98,467 to help Heller win election, including a television ad promising Heller would “oppose any anti-gun nominee to the Supreme Court.”
“This election’s not about the next four years. It’s about the next 40 years. So vote like your freedom depends on it. Because it does,” Cox told audiences in that ad.
Similarly, the NRA has helped block Caitlin Halligan’s rise from the Manhattan district attorney’s office to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a launching pad for several Supreme Court justices. The group pointed to her work on New York’s 2001 lawsuit against gun makers and opposition to a 2005 federal law that shielded firearm companies from liability for crimes committed with their wares.
“Given Ms. Halligan’s clear opposition to a major federal law that was essential to protecting law-abiding Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, as well as an important industry that equips our military and law enforcement personnel, we must respectfully oppose her confirmation,” Cox wrote the lawmakers in 2011.
That appeals court seat has remained vacant since 2005, when President George W. Bush nominated and the Senate confirmed John Roberts as chief justice on the Supreme Court.
Last Thursday, Obama renominated both Cadish and Halligan and urged the Senate to vote.
“I am renominating 33 highly qualified candidates for the federal bench, including many who could have and should have been confirmed before the Senate adjourned,” Obama said.
Yet there was no signal the NRA would drop its opposition.
The group’s deep pockets help bolster allies and punish lawmakers who buck them, on judges or legislation. The group spent at least $24 million in the 2012 elections — $16.8 million through its political action committee and nearly $7.5 million through its affiliated Institute for Legislative Action. Separately, the NRA spent some $4.4 million through July 1 to lobby Congress.
In one case, the group spent about $100,000 — a tremendous sum for a state legislative race — to mount a primary challenge against a Republican Tennessee lawmaker, Debra Maggart, because she wouldn’t toe the NRA’s line in Nashville.
As the NRA works to put its stamp on another branch of government, its influence could be even more lasting — federal judges are appointed for life and aren’t subject to voters in election years.
By: Philip Elliott, The Associated Press, January 9, 2012
“The Hitler Gun Control Lie”: Pro-Proliferation Gun Enthusiasts Have Their History Dangerously Wrong
This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.
The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”
In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”
And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.
Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.
The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).
Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.
Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.
Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.
Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:
This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note.
“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”
Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.
He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, January 11. 2013
“Beware Of Walmart’s Role”: There’s Plenty Of Dark Money Baked Into The Anti-Gun Control Cake
As Vice President Joe Biden plotted his task force’s plan of action on gun control this week, he invited representatives Walmart to the White House to talk about it. That makes sense—as we detailed last month, the retail giant is the biggest seller of weapons and ammunition in the United States. Stakeholders as far-flung as the hunting groups Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever were invited to meet with Biden’s task force, so Walmart surely has a place at the table.
In fact, many progressives and gun control advocates argue this is a very positive development .The thinking goes like this: Walmart would stand to benefit from a strengthened background check system, because independent sellers would have to go to a certified gun retailer (like Walmart) to conduct background checks—or might stop selling guns altogether, thus sending more customers Walmart’s way. The chain also must protect its image as a responsible, family-friendly store: it previously partnered with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to adopt tougher standards for gun sales.
So maybe Walmart can hop on board and advocate for the White House’s gun control package, thus lending a significant voice and lobbying power to the good guys’ side, and creating a crucial rift between gun retailers and manufacturers.
That all sounds good—if it happens like that. (Store officials haven’t yet announced any position on gun control following the White House meetings.) But there’s significant reason to suspect it won’t work out so splendidly. Clearly, the best of both worlds for Walmart would be a strengthened background check system that drives new customers to its stores, and no assault weapons ban.
Gun sales are a key part of Walmart’s recent sales spike, and have shot up 76 percent over the past two years. Walmart doesn’t sell handguns, and so assault rifles make up a significant portion of its gun inventory and thus its increasing sales. Meanwhile, there’s big pressure on Walmart from manufacturers not to stop carrying assault weapons. Freedom Group, a large gun manufacturing conglomerate and maker of the infamous Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, said in its most recent financial report that “In the event that Wal-Mart were to significantly reduce or terminate its purchases of firearms, ammunition and/or other products from us, our financial condition or results of operations and cash flows could be adversely affected.”
Walmart has already shown great hesitancy to pull back whatsoever on assault weapons sales. In the wake of the Newtown shooting, as competitors like Dick’s Sporting Goods yanked all assault rifles from shelves temporarily, Walmart didn’t stop selling a single assault weapon.
So: would Walmart be able so support the White House package upfront, perhaps even winning some special goodies that would drive customers specifically to its stores for background checks, while quietly killing the assault weapons ban behind the scenes? It’s happened before, in a very similar dynamic.
During the healthcare reform battles, the Obama White House was eager to get health insurance companies behind the reform push, and they had every reason to do so—the individual mandate meant millions of new customers. So the industry signed on. But there were many other aspects of the legislation it didn’t like, like the medical loss ratio and the public option. So behind everyone’s back, the health industry funneled massive amounts of money—$102.4 million dollars—to the US Chamber of Commerce to fight those aspects of the bill. This dark money was exceptionally difficult to track, but National Journal did it, months after the final legislation was passed.
Walmart, today, already sends significant amounts of money to strong opponents of gun control. The Walmart 1% blog found that between 2010 and 2012, Walmart gave over $1 million to candidates backed by the NRA. They note that “among politicians with 2012 grades from the NRA, 84% of the Waltons’ 2010-2012 cycle contributions went to candidates with scores between A+ and A-.”
So the retail giant already has some money baked into the anti-gun control cake in Washington, and could certainly promise more to these members if they vigorously oppose an assault weapons ban. Moreover, the dark money problem looms large. As Lee Fang has noted, the NRA has a half-dozen legal entities, many of them able to accept undisclosed donations to mount attack ads and lobbying campaigns. Walmart could easily dump money into these groups and it’s likely we would never know.
An outcome where the background check system is strengthened but there is no assault weapons ban is quite possible: even some conservative members of Congress with ‘A’ ratings from the NRA are coming out for better background checks. Walmart, ever the canny DC operator, must know that this is in reach. I would personally be shocked if the two-step strategy described above isn’t what they end up pursuing.
In that scenario, more gun buyers would be herded to Walmart, where there are plenty of assault rifles helpfully on sale. This is not a good result for gun control advocates. A full assault weapons ban should be enacted—and if Walmart is serious about being a good citizen and backing responsible gun measures, it should lead the way by discontinuing all assault weapon sales. Until it does that, beware any role it plays in the reform process.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, January 11, 2013
“Degrees Of Principle”: In A Sane World, Gun Control Proposals Are Hardly Draconian
Unlike many who recently have joined the debate about gun rights, I have a long history with guns, which I proffer only in the interest of preempting the “elitist, liberal, swine, prostitute, blahblahblah” charge.
I grew up in a home with guns, lots of them, and was taught early how to shoot, care for firearms and treat them respectfully. My father’s rules were simple: Never point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them; if you intend to shoot, aim to kill.
Dear ol’ Dad was a law-and-order guy — a lawyer, judge and World War II veteran who did everything by the book — except when it came to guns. Most memorable among his many lectures was a confidence: “There is only one law in the land that I would break,” he told me. “I will never register my guns.”
I suppose if he hadn’t also opposed bumper stickers, he might have attached the one about “cold dead fingers” to his fender. He also might have liked a slogan I read recently: “With guns, we are citizens; without them, we are subjects.”
By today’s standards my father would be considered a gun nut, but his sentiments were understandable in the context of his time. Like others of his generation, he had witnessed Germany’s disarming of its citizenry and the consequences thereafter. Thus, the slippery slope of which gun-rights advocates speak is not without precedent or reason.
But the history of gun-control laws is not without contradictions and ironies that belie the current insistence that guns-without-controls is the ipso facto of originalist America. In fact, the federal government of our Founders made gun ownership mandatory for white males, while denying others — slaves and later freedmen — the privilege.
Today, the most vociferous defenders of gun rights tend to be white, rural males who oppose any regulation. But theirs was once the ardently held position of radical African Americans. Notably, in the 1960s, Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey Newton toted guns wherever they went to make a point: Blacks needed guns to protect themselves in a country that wasn’t quite ready to enforce civil rights.
In one remarkable incident in May 1967, as recounted in The Atlantic by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, 24 men and six women, all armed, ascended the California capitol steps, read a proclamation about gun rights and proceeded inside — with their guns, which was legal at the time.
Needless to say, conservatives, including then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, were suddenly very, very interested in gun control. That afternoon, Reagan told reporters there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
The degree of one’s allegiance to principle apparently depends mainly on who is holding the gun.
While black activists were adamant about their right to protect themselves, the National Rifle Association wasn’t much interested in the constitutional question until the mid-’70s, when an organizational split produced a new leader, Harlon Carter, who was dedicated to advocacy and determined to dig a deep line in the Beltway sand.
The Second Amendment debate about what the Founders intended was clarified in 2008 when theSupreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller determined that the right of the people to keep and bear arms included individuals, not just a “well-regulated militia.” However, as Winkler pointed out, Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion left wiggle room for exceptions, including prohibitions related to felons and the mentally ill. Scalia was not casting doubt, the justice wrote, on “laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
This still leaves open the loophole of private sales that do not require background checks, which President Obama wants to close. We will hear more about this in coming weeks, but the call meanwhile to ban assault weapons or limit magazines in the wake of the horrific mass murder of children and others at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut is hardly draconian. It won’t solve the problem of mentally disturbed people exacting weird justice from innocents, but it might limit the toll. Having to stop one’s rampage to reload rather breaks the spell, or so one would imagine.
One also imagines that the old Reagan would say there’s no reason a citizen needs an assault weapon or a magazine that can destroy dozens of people in minutes. He would certainly be correct and, in a sane world, possibly even electable.
By: Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 11, 2013
“Freedom To Live In Fear”: One Wonders How Much More Of This “Freedom” We Can Take
“Everybody got a pistol. This must really please the NRA” — from “Gun” by Gil Scott-Heron
So maybe the NRA is about to get its wish.
Here we are, a little over three weeks after the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, CT, a little over two weeks after the National Rifle Association said there should henceforth be armed guards at every school, and at least one school system, Marlboro Township in New Jersey, is taking its advice. Under a 90-day pilot program in partnership with local police, students who returned to school last week found their campuses patrolled by armed officers.
But here’s the thing. If this is truly a good idea — “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in a news conference — then why stop there? After all, it is not just our schools that are being shot up. So let us follow this advice to its logical end.
Consider:
Four firefighters in upstate New York were shot, two of them killed, on Christmas Eve when they responded to a call and were ambushed by a man with a semiautomatic rifle. So we should have armed guards on all our fire trucks.
Two customers were killed two days before Christmas when armed men opened fire with semiautomatic handguns inside a grocery store in Delray Beach, FL. So we should have armed guards at all our grocery stores.
Two people were killed and one injured on Dec. 11 by a gunman who started shooting at a shopping mall near Portland, OR. So we should have armed guards at all our shopping malls.
Two people were killed and two others injured Nov. 6 when an employee started shooting inside a chicken-processing plant in Fresno, CA. So we should have armed guards at all our chicken-processing plants.
One man was killed and five others wounded in a shooting at a New Year’s Eve party in a private residence in Lakewood, CA. So we should have armed guards at all our private residences.
One man was killed, a pregnant woman and her unborn child wounded, in a Dec. 9 drive-by shooting on a street corner in Miami. So we should have armed guards on every street corner.
That list, by the way, represents only a random sampling of recent shootings, most so run-of-the-mill, so plain-vanilla ordinary, they didn’t even make news outside their local areas, which should give you an idea of how common gunfire in this country is. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, nearly 98,000 of us are shot each year, a figure that includes law enforcement activity. That’s nearly 268 a day, 11 every hour.
By the reasoning of the NRA, you do not address that sad state of affairs by crafting laws that strive to balance the rights of responsible gun owners with the need to block the irresponsible, the dangerous, the criminal-minded, the unhinged, from access to these WMDs. No, by the NRA’s reasoning, the solution to too many guns is more guns still.
The organization frames this as a defense of freedom. To which the best rejoinder is provided by Gil Scott-Heron in the song quoted above: “Freedom to be afraid is all you won.”
It is a trenchant observation. Just the other day, two seventh-graders in Tillamook, OR. found a handgun, with a round in the chamber and the safety off, on the floor in a movie theater. It had apparently slipped out of the holster of one Gary Warren Quackenbush, 61, who said he felt the need for protection as he watched The Hobbit.
Quackenbush reportedly feared someone might shoot up the place — as happened in Aurora,CO, last July during a Batman movie. So add movie theaters to the list of places we should have armed guards. We are a people shot through with fear, a nation under the gun.
And one wonders how much more of this “freedom” we can take.
By: Leonard Pitts, The National Memo, January 7, 2013
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