“It’s Time To Ban Guns. Yes, All of Them”: Urgently Needs To Become A Rhetorical And Conceptual Possibility
Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police. Not just because of San Bernardino, or whichever mass shooting may pop up next, but also not not because of those. Don’t sort the population into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with a gun and those who surely will not. As if this could be known—as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them.
I used to refer to my position on this issue as being in favor of gun control. Which is true, except that “gun control” at its most radical still tends to refer to bans on certain weapons and closing loopholes. The recent New York Times front-page editorial, as much as it infuriated some, was still too tentative. “Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership,” the paper argued, making the case for “reasonable regulation,” nothing more. Even the rare ban-guns arguments involve prefacing and hedging and disclaimers. “We shouldn’t ‘take them away’ from people who currently own them, necessarily,” writes Hollis Phelps in Salon. Oh, but we should.
I say this not to win some sort of ideological purity contest, but because banning guns urgently needs to become a rhetorical and conceptual possibility. The national conversation needs to shift from one extreme—an acceptance, ranging from complacent to enthusiastic, of an individual right to own guns—to another, which requires people who are not politicians to speak their minds. And this will only happen if the Americans who are quietly convinced that guns are terrible speak out.
Their wariness, as far as I can tell, comes from two issues: a readiness to accept the Second Amendment as a refutation, and a reluctance to impose “elite” culture on parts of the country where guns are popular. (There are other reasons as well, not least a fear of getting shot.) And there’s the extent to which it’s just so ingrained that banning guns is impossible, legislatively and pragmatically, which dramatically weakens the anti-gun position.
The first issue shouldn’t be so complicated. It doesn’t take specialized expertise in constitutional law to understand that current U.S. gun law gets its parameters from Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment. But it’s right there in the First Amendment that we don’t have to simply nod along with what follows. That the Second Amendment has been liberally interpreted doesn’t prevent any of us from saying it’s been misinterpreted, or that it should be repealed.
When you find yourself assuming that everyone who has a more nuanced (or just pro-gun) argument is simply better read on the topic, remember that opponents of abortion aren’t wondering whether they should have a more nuanced view of abortion because of Roe v. Wade. They’re not keeping their opinions to themselves until they’ve got a term paper’s worth of material proving that they’ve studied the relevant case law.
Then there is the privilege argument. If you grew up somewhere in America where gun culture wasn’t a thing (as is my situation; I’m an American living in Canada), or even just in a family that would have never considered gun ownership, you’ll probably be accused of looking down your nose at gun culture. As if gun ownership were simply a cultural tradition to be respected, and not, you know, about owning guns. Guns… I mean, must it really be spelled out what’s different? It’s absurd to reduce an anti-gun position to a snooty aesthetic preference.
There’s also a more progressive version of this argument, and a more contrarian one, which involves suggesting that an anti-gun position is racist, because crackdowns on guns are criminal-justice interventions. Progressives who might have been able to brush off accusations of anti-rural-white classism may have a tougher time confronting arguments about the disparate impact gun control policies can have on marginalized communities.
These, however, are criticisms of certain tentative, insufficient gun control measures—the ones that would leave small-town white families with legally-acquired guns well enough alone, allowing them to shoot themselves or one another and to let their guns enter the general population.
Ban Guns, meanwhile, is not discriminatory in this way. It’s not about dividing society into “good” and “bad” gun owners. It’s about placing gun ownership itself in the “bad” category. It’s worth adding that the anti-gun position is ultimately about police not carrying guns, either. That could never happen, right? Well, certainly not if we keep on insisting on its impossibility.
Ask yourself this: Is the pro-gun side concerned with how it comes across? More to the point: Does the fact that someone opposes gun control demonstrate that they’re culturally sensitive to the concerns of small-town whites, as well as deeply committed to fighting police brutality against blacks nationwide? I’m going to go with no and no on these. (The NRA exists!)
On the pro-gun-control side of things, there’s far too much timidity. What’s needed to stop all gun violence is a vocal ban guns contingent. Getting bogged down in discussions of what’s feasible is keeps what needs to happen—no more guns—from entering the realm of possibility. Public opinion needs to shift. The no-guns stance needs to be an identifiable place on the spectrum, embraced unapologetically, if it’s to be reckoned with.
By: Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The New Republic, December 10, 2015
“Terrorism Truths No Politician Will Admit”: Republicans Are Uniquely Immune To Learning From History
Here’s a truth that no politician, Democrat or Republican, is going to tell you: There is absolutely nothing that our government could have done to prevent the attack that took 14 lives in San Bernardino last week. If you’re looking for a lesson we can learn from it, that’s the one you ought to take. Universal background checks for gun purchases is a good idea, but it wouldn’t have stopped that couple from killing those people. Starting a new war in the Middle East is a terrible idea, but it also wouldn’t have stopped it.
We can’t stop an attack like the one in San Bernardino before it happens because our ability to do that is dependent on the plot coming to the government’s attention. In order for that to happen, knowledge of the plan has to leak out in some way—to someone who overhears the planning and tells the authorities, to an informant whom the attackers bring into their confidence, over an electronic medium like email or telephone that is being monitored. But what if all you have is a husband and wife working out the details over their kitchen table, and buying their tools of mayhem the same way a hundred million other Americans do, down at the local gun shop? There is no way to stop that.
Which brings us to another truth you won’t see politicians admit: terrorism will never be defeated or vanquished or eliminated or banished. It’s a technique, attractive to those with limited power precisely because it’s relatively easy to use.
Actually, there was a politician who once acknowledged that reality. In 2004, John Kerry said, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.” He cited organized crime as a comparison of what we ought to seek: “It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.” His opponent was positively gleeful that Kerry would say something so weak and defeatist. “I couldn’t disagree more,” said George W. Bush. “Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance, our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorist networks, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world.” His campaign rushed to make a television ad based on Kerry’s quote, and four years later, when he left office, Bush’s strength and resolve had ended the threat of terrorism for all time.
Just kidding—for some inexplicable reason, George Bush didn’t manage to “defeat terror.” But now the members of his party say they’ve got the plan that will take care of it. Donald Trump, who already promised to start torturing prisoners again (not that we have any Islamic State prisoners to torture, but whatever), now says if you want to defeat terrorism, “You have to take out their families.” Sure, it’s a war crime, but just think of the satisfaction we’ll get from killing a bunch of children! Ted Cruz is talkin’ the tough-guy talk too. “If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS,” he said on Saturday. “We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” Yeehaw.
Republicans are uniquely immune to learning from history, and at the moment they’ve convinced themselves that once we crush the Islamic State, terrorism will no longer be much of a problem. But of course that’s just what we thought about Al Qaeda, and it’s what we’ll think about the terror group spawned by our next Middle East war. Let’s just kill these guys, and then the problem will be solved.
How many Americans actually believe that? It’s hard to know. But there’s no question the San Bernardino attack has ratcheted up Americans’ fear. The apparent futility of any practical solution to a threat like this one seems only to drive people into the arms of a hateful demagogue like Trump and the demi-demagogues who scuttle after him. Maybe people actually buy the absurd idea that if we just go after this one terrorist group with enough ruthlessness, no other terrorist group will ever emerge. Maybe people actually believe that if we subject American Muslims to enough suspicion and harassment, no American Muslim will become angry enough to want to kill his or her fellow citizens.
But let’s be honest: what the Republicans are selling isn’t a practical plan to solve a practical problem, because the problem defined that way—can we stop an attack just like this one?—has no real solution. So what they promise is an amplification of all the poisonous emotions swirling inside you. Are you afraid? I will validate your fears and shout that things are even worse than you think. Do you hate? I will give your hatred voice, point it outward, translate it into pledges of rage and violence visited upon the guilty and innocent alike.
In his Oval Office address Sunday night, President Obama tried to make a different argument, that “Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values or giving into fear. That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.” But he too insisted that “The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it.” It’s what any president would have to say, I suppose, to reassure and comfort and give hope. The truth—that no matter what we do there will always be the possibility of terrorist attacks, and some of them will inevitably succeed—isn’t something presidents are supposed to say.
The more important truth, also out of bounds for politicians, is that as horrifying as any one attack is, terrorism is a threat we can live with, just like we live with the threat of natural disasters or crime or the flu, all of which take many more lives than terrorism does. Somehow we manage to accommodate ourselves to those threats without losing our damn minds. Surely there’s a lesson there.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, December 7, 2015
“Down In The NRA Bunker”: NRA TV; A Day In The Life Of An American Gun Nut
Wayne LaPierre stood in front of an artificial backdrop the color of a cartoon midnight sky. He was dressed like a funeral conductor, in a black suit, white shirt and dark purple tie, but he looked like the corpse. Beneath his rimless glasses and permanently-furrowed brow, his face was hollow and his skin was gray, perhaps an effect of the grim topic he was preparing to broach.
“You and I didn’t choose to be targets in the age of terror,” he said.
“But innocents like us will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes. No amount of bloodshed will ever satisfy the demons among us.”
As he spoke, an aria fit for a horror movie played in the background, making his message feel all the more dire, like an end-of-days commercial you might see on some far-flung channel in the middle of the night in between ads for Snuggies and home gyms.
“When evil knocks on our doors, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share: the full-throated right to defend our families and ourselves with our Second Amendment,” he said. “Let fate decide if mercy is offered to the demons at our door.”
LaPierre is the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and this one-minute ad, released on November 30, after the Paris terror attacks, is part of the NRA’s effort to attract more members with commonsense fear-mongering as mass shootings—two in the last few weeks alone, in Colorado and California—and one-off, viral gun deaths—like the case of a 9 year old girl who accidentally shot her instructor in the head with an Uzi—threaten to tar the group’s reputation in the eyes of a incessantly-shaken public.
In 2014, the NRA unveiled plans to launch its own television network of sorts—a series of programs available “anytime and anywhere on your computer, tablet or mobile phone, or web-connected TV via browser, YouTube or Roku streaming player” that would allow people to see how empowering, fun and not-murderous gun culture can be.
NRA News, as it’s called, bills itself as “the most comprehensive video coverage of Second Amendment issues, events and culture anywhere in the world,” but it doesn’t feel of this world at all. It feels like how TV might be in a dystopian future where citizens hoard weapons inside their chrome hover-trailers, which they leave only to restock on Soylent and return to with a sunburn.
The network is broken up into different categories:
Commentary, from a varied cast including LaPierre, right-wing radio host Dana Loesch and Colion Noir (not his real name), a young black man who wears baseball hats, hates “political correctness and dishonesty” and, before being discovered by NRA News, had achieved minor YouTube fame with his pro-gun rants.
Investigative, which has a familiar-sounding show called “Frontlines” that covers things like how America’s energy infrastructure is vulnerable to terror attacks or, in the frantic words of NRA News, “The Fight For Light: The Coming Catastrophe.”
Lifestyle, which houses a vaguely-porny series called “Love At First Shot” that follows youngish women as they learn to shoot firearms for the first time with the instruction of other youngish women (sample description: “Julie Golob is about to show 21-year-old Kaytlin that with the proper instruction and safety in place, she can shoot large calibers with ease).
Profiles, home of “Armed & Fabulous” which, in episode 4, documented the life of Sandra Sadler, who looks like your average grandma except when she’s holding a dead animal by the antlers. She has, the narrator said, “a deep appreciation for the outdoors.”
Campaigns, another channel for the ads like LaPierre’s.
And History, which airs “The Treasure Collection,” the “Antiques Roadshow” of NRA News.
The videos are beautiful and slick, in the style of modern presidential campaign commercials or global warming documentaries. On YouTube, where over 200 of them are posted, they accumulate thousands of views. The clip of LaPierre has over 100,000. (The number of viewers for the shows on the NRA News website is not available, and the NRA did not immediately reply to a request for that information).
Aesthetics aside, the videos are attractive because in life inside NRA News, there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, Cops and Robbers, Freedom-Lovers Like Us and the godforsaken Them. Things are, apparently, simple when you are packing heat.
To the NRA, everything is black and white—but mostly white. Almost everyone featured on NRA News is white, except for Noir, David A. Clarke, a sheriff in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin who became a minor right-wing celebrity by attacking President Obama and Al Sharpton after the Ferguson protests and was featured in a video the NRA posted on 9/11 called “My Honor” (oddly, the NRA didn’t include Clarke’s name in the video, leaving it up to YouTube commenters to identify him), and an elderly woman whose name the NRA also did not include who, in a video titled “My Rights,” said she needed a gun because she lived in government housing where “gang-bangers walk down our halls every day.”
But it’s up against the NRA’s alternative universe of gun-slinging girls and mostly-white patriots in suits who want to preserve your rights that a different narrative is fighting competitively.
On Sunday night, from the Oval Office, Obama used an address about terrorism to condemn gun culture. “We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino,” he said. “I know there are some who reject any gun safety measures. But the fact is that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies—no matter how effective they are—cannot identify every would-be mass shooter, whether that individual is motivated by ISIL or some other hateful ideology. What we can do—and must do—is make it harder for them to kill.”
Obama’s speech came a day after The New York Times ran an editorial on its front page, titled “End the Gun Epidemic in America,” which called for the “outlawing” of “certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition.”
Conservatives reacted in fury. Erick Erickson, the right-wing radio host, sprayed his copy of The Times with 7 bullets and posted a photo of the remains on Twitter, where it currently has over 1,000 retweets.
The Times editorial came a day after The New York Daily News ran a cover with a photo of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, above a row of white men: 4 of them mass shooters, one of them LaPierre. Farook was a terrorist, the News conceded, “(But so are these guys…AND this guy).”
On NRA TV on Monday, Cam Edwards, the burly red-headed, bearded host of Cam & Co (sponsored by Nosler, the ammunition manufacturer) nearly filled 3 hours of airtime with talk of the anti-gun elites in the media.
With the Times op-Ed, Edwards said, “they’ve let the mask slip. They’ve let their intentions be known.”
Behind Edwards, there was a sign which read, “KEEP CALM AND EAT BACON.”
Only in the universe of NRA TV does such serenity—punctuated by bouts of paranoia—seem possible.
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, December 8, 2015
“Who Owns Most Of The Guns? ‘The Base!”: Overlapping Circles Of A Hard Core Of Dangerous Folks
It’s a research finding that is startling but not really surprising (per a report from NBC’s Maggie Fox):
A new study aimed at figuring out who owns gun in the United States and why suggests that about a third of Americans have at least one.
Most are white males over the age of 55, and a “gun culture” is closely linked with ownership, the team at Columbia University reports.
The study, published in the journal Injury Prevention, is one of several trying to pin down the number of gun owners in the United States. No agency keeps statistics on gun ownership and many pro-gun activists advocate keeping gun ownership private because of fears about potential future laws that might take guns away.
Yeah, well, if you really buy into the idea that good people like us need to stockpile weapons in case we need to overthrow a tyrannical socialist regime supported by those people, then I guess you want to present a moving target, eh? But I digress. The study also even less surprisingly shows a geographical gulf in gun ownership:
[Gun ownership percentages ranged] from 5.2 percent in Delaware to 61.7 percent in Alaska,” they wrote in their report. “Gun ownership was 2.25 times greater among those reporting social gun culture than those who did not,” they added.
In the Northeast, gun ownership rates ranged from 5.8 percent in Rhode Island to 28.8 percent in Vermont.
In the Midwest, rates ranged from 19.6 percent in Ohio to 47.9 percent in North Dakota. In the South and mid-Atlantic, rates ranged from 5.2 percent in Delaware to 57.9 percent in Arkansas. And in the West, California had the lowest rate of gun ownership at 20 percent, while nearly 62 percent of Alaskans said they had a gun.
Now this rural habit of disproportionate gun ownership is often related to the opportunity for and interest in hunting, and of a “gun culture” (to use the Columbia report’s terminology) in which social life revolves around gun-related activities. Both these factors are undoubtedly important. But there is something more basic than that: isolation. The first time in my life I really thought about owning a gun was one night when I was awakened at 2:00 AM in my central Virginia home at the end of a two-mile dirt road by approaching–and then extinguished–headlights. At that moment, I wasn’t real confident in the safety offered by a baseball bat, a Bichon Frise, and police officers who were at least 30 minutes away.
On the other hand, even then I didn’t really want an assault rifle, and I would have probably regretted firing hundreds of rounds at that parked car which in the end probably contained teenagers messing around or smoking pot.
Putting aside for a moment geography or the objective advisability of owning some sort of gun for self-protection, there is something fundamentally disquieting about the fact that the Americans most likely to own guns are also the Americans most likely to embrace a political rationale for gun ownership and most likely to believe they’re getting outvoted by people who don’t share their values. Somewhere in these overlapping circles is a hard core of dangerous folks who are being told constantly by Republican politicians that they are losing or have already lost their most fundamental rights. And this is why political extremism is a bad thing even if its devotees lose most elections.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 30, 2015
“Nothing Short Of Horrifying”: Here A Gun, There A Gun, Everywhere A Gun
As Jaime and I noted yesterday, many Democratic politicians feel the need to preface any discussion of guns with an assurance that they, too, own guns and love to shoot, as though that were the price of admission to a debate on the topic. But what you seldom hear is anyone, politician or otherwise, say, “I don’t own a gun and I don’t ever intend to” as a statement of identity, defining a perspective that carries moral weight equal to that of gun owners. So it was good to see Josh Marshall, in a thoughtful post, say, “Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. And I have my own set of rights not to have gun culture run roughshod over me.” Let me tell you my perspective on this, and offer some thoughts on the question of what sort of a society we want to have when it comes to the question of guns. Because there are two radically different visions that are clashing here.
For the record, I, too, am not a gun owner (you’re shocked to learn this, I know). I took riflery at camp as a kid, shooting a .22 at paper targets (and when you achieved each new level of marksmanship, you got a certificate from the NRA!), and I’ve held unloaded guns a few times. I understand the attraction of guns. They give you a feeling of power and potency, and they’re fun to shoot, which is why every little boy loves playing with toy guns. But in the town where I grew up, you never saw a gun that wasn’t in a cop’s holster. If any of my classmates’ parents had them (and I’m sure some did), they never mentioned it, and my own parents would sooner have adopted a pack of hyenas than brought a gun into our home. As far as that community was concerned, the relative absence of guns was one of the things that made it a nice place to live. It wasn’t because everyone got together and took a vote on it, but that absence was nevertheless an expression of the community’s collective will.
I’m sure that many gun advocates would hear that and say, “Don’t you realize how vulnerable you all were? You should have been armed!” But the truth is we weren’t vulnerable (crime was low; I have a vague memory of one murder that happened during my entire childhood but I could be imagining it), and although as kids we always complained that the town was boring, everyone seemed pretty happy with the security situation. And if one day, a few of the town’s citizens started letting everyone know that they were now carrying firearms when they were down at the drugstore or the bank, it wouldn’t have made anyone feel safer. Just the opposite, in fact. It would have changed everything for the worse.
What I’m getting at is that one of the things that makes a society work is that people have rights that are protected in the law, but they also exercise those rights with consideration for the society’s other members. For instance, we have a strong commitment to freedom of expression, such that many things that would be deemed obscene and get you tossed in jail in other countries are tolerated here. So if I want do a performance art piece that involves lots of cursing and tossing about bodily fluids, I can do it. But I’m not going to do it on the sidewalk in front of your house during dinner time, not because I don’t have the right, but because that would make me an asshole. In the exercising of my rights, I’d be changing the conditions of your existence, even for a brief time, in a way that you’d find unpleasant. So because I value having a society where we all live together, I’ll choose to find a theater to put on my performance, and you can choose to come see it or not. In the same way, if you choose to have a gun in your home because you think it protects you, that’s your right. I’m going to choose not to let my kid come play with your kid at your house, and we can all get along.
According to the Constitution, you have a right to own a gun. I’ll be honest and say that I wish it weren’t so; the fantasies the most extreme gun advocates notwithstanding, our liberty is protected by our laws and institutions, not by our ability to wage war on our government. Canadians and Britons and French people aren’t any less free than we are because they are less able to start killing cops and soldiers when they decide the time for insurrection has come. Nevertheless, that basic right exists and it isn’t going to be taken away. But the rest of us should also be able to say that there are limits to how far your exercising that right should be allowed to change the rest of our lives, and if necessary the law should enforce those limits.
As I’ve written before, the goal of many gun advocates, particularly those who promote concealed carry, is that we make it so as many people as possible take as many guns as possible into as many places as possible. That’s been the focus of their legislative efforts in recent years, not only passing concealed carry laws nearly everywhere, but also passing laws to make you able to take guns into bars, schools, government buildings, houses of worship, and so on, and also advocating for laws that would let you take your guns to communities where it would be otherwise illegal to carry them. Which would mean that your right to carry your gun trumps the right of everyone else to say, this is a place where we’ve decided we don’t want people bringing guns.
Is it possible that on my next visit to the local coffee place, a madman might come and shoot the place up? Yes, it’s possible. And is it possible that if half the patrons were armed, one of them might be able to take him down and limit the number of people he killed? Yes, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll win the next Powerball. But if holding out that infinitesimal possibility means that every time I go down for a coffee, I’m entering a place full of guns, it’s not a price I’m willing to pay. That’s the decision I’ve made, and it’s the decision that the other people in my community have made as well.
But gun advocates want to create a society governed by fear, or at the very least, make sure that everyone feels the same fear they feel. “An armed society is a polite society,” they like to say, and it’s polite because we’re all terrified of each other. They genuinely believe that that the price of safety is that there should be no place where guns, and the fear and violence they embody, are not present. Not your home, not your kids’ school, not your supermarket, not your church, no place. But for many of us—probably for most of us—that vision of society is nothing short of horrifying.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 18, 2013
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