“African America Has Promises To Keep”: Sometimes, You Simply Have A Duty To Bear Witness
We are gathered here today not to argue about some policy prescription, nor to excoriate some public figure. No, we are gathered because sometimes, you have no choice, sometimes, you simply have a duty to bear witness.
A child was killed last week in Chicago. He was shot to death.
It is a measure of America that the statement is, of itself, unremarkable. Children are shot all the time in this country. But what makes this shooting stand out is that 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee was targeted. Police say the child, who was black, was lured into an alley and shot multiple times.
According to them, the execution was part of an ongoing dispute between rival street gangs and was intended as retaliation against Tyshawn’s father, Pierre Stokes. They say Stokes, 25, is a gang member who has refused to cooperate with the investigation. Stokes, in turn, told the Chicago Tribune he doesn’t believe the killing had anything to do with him and that anybody who wanted to hurt him could do so easily enough without going after his son. “I’m not hard to find,” he said.
Twenty-one years ago, a 5-year-old black child named Eric Morse was dropped 14 stories to his death by a 10-year-old and an 11-year-old because he would not steal candy for them.
It is, however, the death of another black boy from Chicago that paints all this in shades of irony. In 1955, Mamie Till Mobley sent her 14-year-old only child, Emmett Till, down South to spend the summer. After he was lynched for supposedly flirting with a white woman, she recalled ruefully how she had warned him to be careful; told him Mississippi was dangerous for black children.
But six decades later, there are few places more dangerous for black children — for black people — than Chicago itself. In 2014, 411 people died there by murder or non-negligent manslaughter. New York City, with three times Chicago’s 2.7 million population, only recorded 333 such deaths. An overwhelming number of the victims were (as always) African-American.
Black lives matter, we say. Indeed, a lifetime ago, black people decided they mattered too much to sit helplessly by as they were poured out like water by hateful white men in places like Mississippi, Florida and Arkansas. So six million strong, they fled the South in a Great Migration, seeking “liberty and justice for all,” “all men are created equal,” “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and all the other promises that comprise America.
Chicago was one of their major destinations. It was the pot of gold at the end of the railroad tracks. It was the exhalation of hope heard as the bus doors sighed open.
But black people soon found that in Chicago — as in other cities — America’s promise offered them only mop buckets, chauffeur’s caps and ghettos teeming with vermin, the constricted parameters of their lives patrolled by police with batons and bankers with maps crisscrossed by red lines. Eventually, the parameters would also enforce themselves: miseducation, teen pregnancy and crime.
Small wonder, in that sludge of human malfunction, that someone became cold enough to target a little boy for execution. Or that a 25-year-old father now mourns a 9-year-old son.
And bearing witness feels like impotence, but like duty, too, a reminder that there are promises America still owes African America, and that African America also owes itself, promises life owes to life and that the price of the ongoing refusal to keep those promises is too often paid in children’s blood.
Five days after Tyshawn’s murder, a boy named J’Quantae Riles was shot to death shortly after visiting a Chicago barbershop. He was 14.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, November 11, 2015
“Sensible Gun Owners Should Abhor The NRA”: The NRA Has Elevated Firearms Ownership To A Religion
My father loved hunting game in the woods of rural Alabama. His idea of a good time involved getting up in the wee hours of a chilly fall morning and going out to sit for hours in a tree stand, waiting for a buck to come within range.
As a gun owner, he was not at all unusual among his friends and family members, many of whom kept pistols, rifles and shotguns. A veteran of Korea, he saw firearms as an essential tool.
But my father would not recognize today’s National Rifle Association or its many counterparts — a gun lobby that insists Americans ought to be free to carry their firearms into churches, schools, and bars. He would have thought that was a crazy idea that would make the world more dangerous, not safer.
He would have been horrified by the plague of mass shootings, the latest of which claimed nine innocent victims at Umpqua Community College in southern Oregon earlier this month. And he certainly would not have believed that the massacre could have been prevented if more of the faculty and students had been armed.
What has happened to responsible gun owners like my father? Where did the sane hunters go? Why aren’t they standing up to protest the outrageous politics of the NRA?
My father died in 1984, before the gun lobby became completely unhinged. Indeed, its political transformation into a network of firearms extremists has been so complete that many Americans don’t know that the NRA started out as an organization of sportsmen who taught marksmanship and gun safety skills.
In 1934, Karl Frederick, then NRA president, told Congress, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. … I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
Needless to say, the NRA has all but erased, Soviet-style, that part of its history from official records. By the late 1970s, the organization had started along a path of strident advocacy that has elevated firearms ownership to a religion. The organization and its several counterparts have formed a vast political network that threatens any politician who pleads for modest regulation, that insists on arming every man, woman and child, that feeds its supporters propaganda to fuel their paranoia. Its leaders have brainwashed their followers into believing that the government wishes to confiscate all guns and subjugate citizens, a proposition too crazy to tackle rationally (so I won’t).
But responsible gun owners certainly ought to be fighting back against that nonsense and demanding sensible politics from the gun lobby that purports to represent them. Why don’t they?
By 1982, the gun lobby had become so powerful that it was able to pass legislation that prevents the federal government from keeping a database linking firearms to their owners. In other words, the sort of information readily available about vehicles or houses is not available about guns. That makes tracing firearms used in crimes much more difficult.
The gun lobby has also managed to prevent the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence as a public health hazard. As President Obama noted after the Umpqua massacre,
“We spend over a trillion dollars and pass countless laws and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil. … And, yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”
My dad never carried a pistol on his person. He certainly didn’t think he should have one at church or at the school where he served as principal.
He didn’t want me to own a gun, either; he thought I’d be better off with a good burglar alarm and a big dog. He knew better than to think that more firearms equal enhanced safety.
What happened to sensible gun owners like him?
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, October 10, 2015
“A Useful Point Of Comparison”: With This Statistic, Canada Demonstrates What A Difference Gun Control Can Make
No mainstream American politician would ever propose to get rid of all guns. But what might happen if we seriously approached the issues of gun safety, licensing, and registration?
As a country that allows private gun ownership and also has a robust hunting culture, Canada offers a useful point of comparison with the United States. However, the two countries are quite different in terms of their gun control laws, and, as it happens, their gun murder rates: The United States has a whopping 89 firearms per 100 residents, the number-one rank in the world, while Canada’s guns are at 31 firearms per 100 people, putting it in the 13th place globally. The country also has a comprehensive system of gun licensing — with citizens required to take a safety course if they want to own and operate a gun, which is, after all, a dangerous piece of machinery.
Under Canada’s laws, handguns have been registered since 1934. Other changes in gun policy have occurred over the decades, including the creation in the 1970s of the Firearms Acquisition License, now known as a Possession and Acquisition License (PAL), which is a permit needed in order to purchase a gun. And licenses to carry guns in Canada are quite rare.
A centralized system of issuing gun licenses began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of a wave of gun control legislation brought forward by both the Conservative and Liberal parties. When the latter party came into office in 1993, much of the implementation became their task — and the new registration of long guns became a wedge issue in rural areas, particularly in western Canada where the Conservative Party would grow to dominate.
In 2012, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Conservative Party repealed the long gun registry and destroyed the records that had been amassed from it — but there are still records on “restricted” and “prohibited” guns, generally various forms of handguns and/or automatic weapons. (As the Royal Canadian Mounted Police makes very clear, the long gun registry repeal “does not change the requirement for all individuals to hold a licensee in order to possess a firearm.”) And not even the Conservatives would propose getting rid of the the handgun registry, safety courses, or gun licenses as they now exist.
So what difference, if any, might be gleaned from Canada’s focus on gun safety and efforts to keep weapons out of the wrong hands?
To start with a baseline, the United States has a population roughly nine times that of Canada, according to the most up-to-date figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and its northern counterpart, Statistics Canada.
In Canada in 2013, the most recent year for which numbers have been posted by Statistics Canada, there were a total of 505 homicides — which would be proportional to about 4,534 homicides in the United States.
But in the United States, according to the FBI, there were 12,253 homicides in 2013 — a factor of 2.9 times the Canadian equivalent.
Now let’s dig in a little further and look at the impact that gun violence might be having on these numbers. In the U.S. figures, 8,454 of these homicides — 69 percent — were committed with firearms, compared to only 26 percent in Canada — 131, or a U.S. equivalent of 1,179, which is less than 1/7th of America’s gun killings.
Of the non-gun killings — with various methods including stabbings, beatings, fire, poisoning, and so on — here the numbers are obviously much closer. The United States had 3,799 in 2013, while Canada had 374 — which would correspond to 3,366 in the United States, giving the U.S. a figure only 13 percent greater than Canada’s.
Or to put it more simply: Nearly the entire difference in the homicide numbers between the United States and Canada comes from guns.
But to quote the late, great American comedian Bill Hicks: “But there’s no connection — and you’d be a fool and a communist to make one — there’s no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone.”
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, October 7, 2015
“This Is Why The Gun Nuts Win”: An Oregon Sheriff’s Nutty Conspiracy Theories Explains The GOP’s Impotence
Mass shootings and gun-crazed conspiracy theorists: Our country is swimming in an abundance of both, so it was just a matter of time before the two collided, not on the shooter side of the equation but on the law enforcement side.
John Hanlin, the sheriff of Douglas County who has been in charge of the police response and investigation of Thursday’s shooting at Umpqua Community College, has fallen under media scrutiny because he’s left an eyebrow-raising trail of gun nuttery that shades into conspiracy theorist territory. His past behavior calls into question not just his own office’s ability to handle this case responsibly, but tells us a lot about why it’s so hard to even begin to have a reasonable conversation about guns in this country, much less move towards sensible policies to reduce gun violence.
Conservatives aren’t lying when they say they need guns to feel protected. But it’s increasingly clear that they aren’t seeking protection from crime or even from the mythical jackbooted government goons come to kick in your door. No, the real threat is existential. Guns are a totemic shield against the fear that they are losing dominance as the country becomes more liberal and diverse and, well, modern. For liberals, the discussion about guns is about public health and crime prevention. For conservatives, hanging onto guns is a way to symbolically hang onto the cultural dominance they feel slipping from their hands.
This comes across clearly in the letter that Hanlin wrote to Vice President Joe Biden in 2013 where he asked that the administration “NOT tamper with or attempt to amend the 2nd Amendment” and where he threatened ominously, “any federal regulation enacted by Congress or by executive order of the president offending the constitutional rights of my citizens shall not be enforced by me or by my deputies, nor will I permit the enforcement of any unconstitutional regulations or orders by federal officers within the borders of Douglas County Oregon.”
Despite all the attempts at formal, legalistic language, Hanlin is clearly writing more in a mythical vein than he is actually addressing any real world policy concerns. His absolutist language about the 2nd amendment ignores the fact that there are already federal and state regulations on guns and who can buy them. More disturbingly, his posturing about open rebellion against the federal government evokes the conspiracy theory-mindset of the hard right, the kind of paranoid hysteria about federal power that led to so much violence during the Clinton administration, from shootouts at Waco and Ruby Ridge to the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City. This is not a letter from someone soberly assessing the pros and cons of proposed regulations on firearms. This is the letter of someone wrapped up in childish fantasies of revolution.
In case there is any doubt about this, Hanlin also, at the same time, used his personal Facebook page to promote the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation meant to give cover to the federal government gun grab that right wingers have been warning us for decades is coming any day now.
It’s not just Hanlin. Guns are generally talked about in right-wing circles in these mythical terms. And because a gun isn’t just a gun to conservatives, but a symbol of all they hold dear, having a reasonable conversation about gun control has become impossible. To liberals, it’s about keeping guns out of the hands of people who misuse them. But to conservatives, it’s clearly about stripping away their very sense of identity, which is naturally going to be a touchier subject.
That’s why Republican politicians would rather say the dumbest, most offensive things possible after a mass shooting than even entertain the possibility that guns might need a teeny bit more regulation. Jeb Bush is getting a lot of grief for saying, in the wake of this latest shooting, that “stuff happens, there’s always a crisis,” but there’s not much else he could say without running the risk of losing the primary. To dare suggest that guns, which have become this precious symbol of conservative identity, could be anything but pure and good and wholesome is just bad politics for a Republican. You might as well wipe your shoes with the American flag in their eyes.
This is also why Mike Huckabee went with the baldly ridiculous route of saying, ““Seven hundred people a year get killed because somebody beats them up with their fist,” as if that’s comparable to the 11,000 people who are murdered by guns a year. The point of this rhetoric is to distract from the fact that guns were invented for the sole purpose of killing. Instead, Huckabee is invoking the framework where the gun is actually a symbol of all that conservatives hold dear instead of what they really are, which is weapons that have no use outside of being weapons.
Squaring the emotional attachment to firearms with the real world fact that guns are weapons that kill innocent people causes too much cognitive dissonance, and so the pleasant fantasy is chosen over the hard reality. For gun victims, however, there is no fantasy, but just the gruesome fact that guns are weapons that can deal death with a minimum amount of effort from aspiring murderers.
By: Amanda Marcotte, Salon, October 5, 2015
“It’s Not About The Motive, It’s About The Gun. Again”: Enacting Gun Control Dramatically Reduces The Problem
One of the challenges in writing about gun violence in the United States is the repetitive nature of it. Every time one of these preventable massacres occurs, writers of reasonable political intelligence point out some basic obvious and commonsense truths. Then nothing is done. Then the next entirely predictable massacre takes place, and the Right trots out all the usual inane defenses of American gun culture, and we have the same stupid debates as if it all hadn’t happened the previous time, and the time before that and the time before that.
In that vein, I’ve said this before, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to say it again: we need to stop focusing on the motives of the killers, and start focusing on the gun.
After each of these mass killings–I refuse to call them tragedies because tragedies tend to be inevitable and unstoppable, which these killings are not–Americans always want to know why. What was going through the mind of the killer? Can we learn the signs in advance? Who was to blame? (Besides the gun, since everyone knows we won’t do anything about that.)
So in the wake of the Isla Vista shootings by a sexually frustrated and entitled young man, we had a discussion of misogyny and male entitlement. After the Fort Hood shootings conservatives had a field day attacking Islam. After the Charleston shootings liberals had an effective punching bag to talk about race.
Now we see each side attempting to use the latest shootings for its own political advantage. Those on the left are pointing to the shooter’s self-described conservative Republican views and his misogynist sexual entitlement syndrome. Those on the right are working themselves into a frenzy over his atheism and his alleged targeting of Christians, going so far as to suggest that Christians start arming themselves in response. And so it goes.
But all of this needs to stop, because it’s pointless. Almost by definition, people who intentionally walk into a public space and indiscriminately kill large numbers of people don’t tend to be sane or have clearly thought out motives. More importantly, other industralized democracies also have angry, lonely, crazy people from all over the political spectrum.
Other countries have mental illness, instant celebrity culture, sexually entitled men, radical theocrats, radical atheists and violent movies/video games. But they don’t have this problem.
Further, we know that no matter what cultural elements may be present, enacting gun control dramatically reduces the problem. We already know this to be true from the experience of Australia, which has libertarian frontier culture and demography quite similar to our own.
Trying to focus on the motives of a mass shooter is a fool’s errand that plays into the hands of those who like the status quo. Focus on the gun, because that’s the common denominator and the ultimate cause of the problem.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly , October 4, 2015
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