“The NRA Shoots Itself In The Foot”: A Shill For Gun Manufacturers And The Home Of Unhinged Conspiracy Theorists
The National Rifle Association finally weighed in on the gun debate today, in a news conference (albeit one in which they took no questions) setting out their feelings at this critical moment. And they gave the movement for greater restrictions on guns the biggest favor it could have hoped for. While the organization was once devoted to marksmanship and gun safety, in recent years it has increasingly become a shill for the gun manufacturers that fund it and the home of unhinged conspiracy theorists. As it showed today, the worst thing it can do for its cause is to step into the light.
You can read Wayne LaPierre’s entire statement here, but here’s a choice excerpt:
We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.
Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?
The italics and exclamation points are in the original. LaPierre went on to say, “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.” Gun manufacturers? Nope. Hollywood! He went on to blame the news media, and even added a little doomsday prepper rhetoric (“Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization”). And then came the proposal: What we need to do, LaPierre said, is immediately place armed police officers in every school in America.
So the NRA’s plan is this: Make sure that as many people as possible buy as many guns as possible and are allowed to take them into as many places as possible. And then, as this army of “monsters and predators” descends upon our schools, have someone there to return fire. Sounds reasonable.
If the NRA had just kept its head low like it did after every other mass shooting we’ve had in recent years, it would have done itself a favor. But I think that in years to come we may look back on this press conference as one of the key moments in a change in how people and legislators think of the NRA. It was a big public reminder, to people who may not have been aware of it, that these people are crazy. Even many gun owners, and many of the NRA’s own members, think the positions the organization takes are too extreme. When it’s this public about its dream vision of the society it would like to see, where every public place, from streets to supermarkets to parks to restaurants to schools, is nothing more than a gun battle waiting to happen, people are going to recoil in disgust. And to repeat, that includes lots of people who own guns.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“The NRA’s Worse Nightmare”: Gun-Rights Advocates Should Fear History Of Second Amendment
On Sunday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer went on CBS’s Face The Nation and argued that people who support gun control “have to admit that there is a Second Amendment right to bear arms”.
Schumer’s effort to reach out to the gun-rights community may be well-intentioned, but it is also deeply ironic. If the nation truly embraced the Second Amendment as it was originally written and understood, it would be the NRA’s worst nightmare.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
It’s time for a history lesson about one of America’s most popular and least understood rights. It’s also long past time to expose the hollow, ignorant fawning over the Second Amendment by gun-rights advocates for what it is.
In contrast to the libertarian fantasies that drive the contemporary debate about firearms in America, the Founders understood that liberty without regulation leads not to freedom, but anarchy. They understood that an armed body of citizens easily becomes a mob. In other words, a bunch of guys grabbing their guns and waving a flag emblazoned with a rattlesnake is not a militia.
A cursory look at the history of the Second Amendment shows that regulation was a central part of its rationale—putting “well regulated” at the very start of the amendment was no accident. For instance, starting in the colonial period, states enacted a variety of “safe-storage” measures to deal with the danger posed by stored gunpowder. A 1786 law went as far as prohibiting the storage of a loaded gun in any building in Boston.
But many people who defend gun rights today are more than happy to skim over the first part of the amendment in their zeal to embrace the second. (The NRA itself literally chopped off that pesky first half when it chiseled the words on the face of its old headquarters.) As a result, our modern gun-rights ideology is often unmoored from any sense of corresponding civic obligation.
This ideology claims to rely heavily on the Second Amendment, and yet it is rooted not in the Founders’ vision, but in the insurrectionary ideas of Daniel Shays and those who rose up against the government of Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787. Indeed, there are gun-rights advocates today who think the Second Amendment actually gives them the right to take up arms against the government—but if that were true the Second Amendment would have repealed the Constitution’s treason clause, which defines treason as taking up arms against the government!
This is all so deeply twisted: after all, the Founders framed the Constitution in part as a response to the danger posed by Shays’ Rebellion.
As a result, our modern debate over gun rights has virtually nothing to with the Founders’ Second Amendment; that debate actually started about 30 years after the Amendment was adopted. What emerged was the notion that reasonable regulation was not inconsistent with the right to bear arms. In fact it was the only option in a heavily armed society.
Up until the 1980s, there was no “individual-rights” theory of the Second Amendment. Many states had adopted provisions protecting an individual right to own guns, but this tradition was distinct from the Amendment. All that changed when right-wing think tanks undertook a conscious effort to fund new scholarship to rewrite the amendment’s history. At first that effort was not well received, even in conservative circles. As late as 1991, former Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger famously called the idea of an individual right to bear arms “one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
But the revisionism ultimately won over most of the legal establishment, reaching its zenith in 2008, when the Supreme Court broke with 70 years of established jurisprudence and affirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have guns in the home for reasons of self-defense.
In order to do this, the majority followed the lead of gun-rights advocates and essentially excised the first clause of the amendment—the “well-regulated militia” part—from the text.
(Let us pause briefly to note the irony that the opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller, was written by none other than Justice Antonin Scalia—America’s staunchest defender of originalism, or reading the Constitution according to its supposed original meaning.)
If the Heller court had simply said, “Look, most Americans think the Amendment is about an individual right, and no one really cares what James Madison or the average man on the street in 1791 thought”—then the case would be pretty uncontroversial. Instead, Scalia produced a pompous, error-filled opinion that has done more to discredit his beloved originalism than a generation of liberal academics ever could.
Even leading conservative legal scholars have harshly criticized the ruling: federal judge Richard Posner said most professional historians reject Scalia’s historical analysis in the case, and described Scalia’s jurisprudence as “incoherent”. Perhaps even more damning, J. Harvie Wilkinson, a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, compared Heller to Roe v. Wade.
Of course, the fact that the Second Amendment is now treated as an individual right has almost no bearing on gun regulation, because no right is absolute. You can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, nor can you fire a gun in one.
And most Americans—including those who own guns—are open to reasonable gun regulation. The only people who oppose such policies are the NRA, extreme gun-rights advocates, and the craven politicians who do their bidding.
But what would such regulation look like?
For one thing, we could have a comprehensive system of firearm licensing and registration. At the moment we have none (even though it is hard to fathom how one might ever muster a militia without such a system). To avoid the irrational fears of gun confiscation, such a system ought to be instituted by the states, which maintained militias long before the Second Amendment existed. Could anyone with even a minimal understanding of the history of the Second Amendment seriously maintain that a state-based system violated the Amendment’s text or spirit?
The bottom line is that although we hear the Second Amendment invoked all the time, few of those who trumpet it the most vehemently realize that restoring the Founders’ vision of the Second Amendment would be a call for more gun regulation, not less.
By: Saul Cornell, The Daily Beast, December 18, 2012
“Guns Are Different”: It’s Long Past Time We Started Treating Them That Way
It’s safe to say that we’ve had more of a national discussion about guns in the last four days than we’ve had in the last 15 years. The particular measures to address gun violence that are now in the offing run from those that are well-intended but likely to be ineffectual (renewing the assault weapons ban, for instance) to some that could have a more meaningful effect even if they’re difficult to implement (universal background checks, licensing, and training). But the most useful change that may come out of this moment in our history is a change in the way we look at guns.
By that I don’t mean that Americans will suddenly stop fetishizing guns, or that everyone will agree they’re nothing but trouble. But if we’re lucky, perhaps we could come to an agreement on something simple. Yes, our constitution guarantees that people can own guns, much as many of us wish it didn’t. But even in the context of that freedom, we should be able to agree that guns are different. The freedom to own guns is different from other freedoms, and guns are different from other products. A sane society should be able to acknowledge that difference and use it to guide the choices it makes.
If you say, “I want a gun,” the rest of us can say, OK, you have that right. But guns pose a potentially lethal danger, so that means we need a special set of rules to deal with them. After all, we do this already. If you want a car, you can’t just get one. First, you have to prove to your state that you are competent to drive it. Then you have to register it with the government, and you have to get insurance for it. We agree to this more restrictive set of rules for cars than for televisions or refrigerators because what you do with a car affects other people. Cars are dangerous. Used improperly, they can kill people.
Would it be so hard for gun owners to admit that guns are different? After all, their unique ability to kill is the whole attraction. Nobody buys guns because they make a pleasing noise. They buy them because they can kill. That’s their entire purpose. Sometimes that purpose is used for good, sometimes for ill, but killing is what guns are for. Even if you think you’ll only use your gun to scare off robbers, it’s the gun’s ability to kill that makes it possible for you to scare off a robber with it.
The most extreme gun owners seem to believe not only that their right to amass weaponry should be unlimited, but that they shouldn’t even have to suffer the tiniest of inconveniences in the exercising of that right. If every time you wanted to buy a gun you had to go down to the local police station to register the gun you’re buying, and even be photographed and fingerprinted if you haven’t already, it could indeed be a bit of a hassle—it might even take a whole hour. But I think most responsible gun owners would find it perfectly tolerable to treat the exercising of their right to buy guns much like we treat the exercising of the right to buy a car. When you buy a gun, you’ve put the life of everyone in your community into your hands. The rest of us have to live with your possession of lethal force and the threat it could pose to us. Is it too much to ask for you to endure a bit of inconvenience? Because guns are different, and it’s long past time we started treating them that way.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 17, 2012
“Shuffling To The Right”: While You Weren’t Looking, Michigan Turned Into Texas
The Michigan legislature’s lame duck session is only three weeks long, but the state house didn’t need more than 18 hours to move the state sharply to the right. During a marathon session Thursday and Friday, the state house passed a variety of very conservative bills on issues from abortion to gun control to taxes. You can’t say they’re not efficient. The state, which favored Obama by 9 points and has long been home to a moderate-progressive movement, may now have a set of laws that puts it on America’s more conservative end.
Perhaps most shocking for pro-choice advocates was the effort to restrict abortion rights—or, as Mother Jones put it, “the abortion mega-bill.” Assuming the governor signs the bill into law, women in Michigan will now have to buy separate insurance policies to cover abortion. Otherwise, even in cases of rape or miscarriage, the abortion will not be covered. Clinics that provide more than 120 abortions a year will now face significantly more stringent licensing and regulation standards, much stricter than most other medical facilities. Pro-choice advocates have argued the new building codes and other requirements could shut down many clinics. Which, of course, is likely the idea of the bill in the first place.
Another bill does away with a bunch of gun-free zones, allowing people with concealed weapons permits to carry said concealed weapons in schools, day cares, hospitals—just about everywhere. The law does, however, allow schools and private businesses to remain gun-free zones voluntarily. The bill was passed before the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, but there’s little indication that changes the calculus for gun-rights advocates. Steve Dulan, who heads the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners, told the Petoskey News the measure would offer more protection from such shootings. “If you have pistol free zones they are actually mass murderer empowerment zones,” he said. Similar measures have been passed around the country, advocated by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), with the idea being that an armed citizen might be able to take down a shooter. Some public safety officials, however, have pointed out that more guns can complicate the situation for law enforcement. When both are armed, it’s hard to tell the murderers from the do-gooders.
There’s more of course. One measure would require voters to declare their citizenship before they can cast a ballot. Another makes recalling elected officials more difficult by shortening the number of days during which signatures could be collected from 90 to 60.
The bills now go to Republican Governor Rick Snyder. Earlier this year, Snyder made headlines when he vetoed a voter-ID bill, bucking his party because, in his own words, “the right to vote is precious.” But there’s little indication he’ll be pushing back against fellow Republicans this time around. He already signed right-to-work legislation into law last Tuesday, which he previously didn’t support. The new law strikes a blow to unions in a state where they once commanded tremendous power, and now puts Michigan in the same category with states in the South and plains, where workers have had considerably less power.
It used to be that parties in each state had unique identities and different policy priorities. Republican parties in Midwestern manufacturing states looked different than those in the rural (and often more conservative) parts of the country. Now, as deep red states like Texas and Oklahoma start their legislative sessions in January, it seems, they can get some bill ideas from Michigan.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, December 17, 2012
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