“A New Day For Packing Heat”: A Cold War Style Balance Of Terror
I noted yesterday that July 1, the first day of the fiscal year in 46 states, is often a day when new laws take effect. So it’s not surprising that Georgia’s new expanded open carry law came in with what was nearly a bang, per this report from Dean Poling of the Valdosta Daily Times:
On the first day of the new Georgia Safe Carry Protection Act, a misunderstanding between two armed men in a convenience store Tuesday led to a drawn firearm and a man’s arrest.
“Essentially, it involved one customer with a gun on his hip when a second customer entered with a gun on his hip,” said Valdosta Police Chief Brian Childress.
At approximately 3 p.m. Tuesday, police responded to a call regarding a customer dispute at the Enmark on the corner of Park Avenue and North Lee Street.
A man carrying a holstered firearm entered the store to make a purchase. Another customer, also with a holstered firearm, approached him and demanded to see his identification and firearms license, according to the Valdosta Police Department report.
The customer making demands for ID pulled his firearm from its holster but never pointed it at the other customer, who said he was not obligated to show any permits or identification.
He demanded the man’s ID again. Undeterred by the drawn gun, the man paid for his items, left the store and called for police.
Authorities arrested Ronald Williams, 62, on a charge of disorderly conduct, related to the pulling of a weapon inside of the store, according to the VPD. Police confiscated Williams’ weapon and took him to the Lowndes County Jail.
It’s a hell of a note when someone exercising his Second Amendment rights has to show a permit for that hand cannon on his hip. The whole idea of open carry law is to encourage a Cold War style balance of terror where everybody’s packing heat.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, July 2, 2014
“Turn The NRA’s Weapon Against It”: Gun Lobbyist, “I Have Never Believed In The General Practice Of Carrying Weapons”
In 1934, the National Rifle Association’s lobbyist testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” the lobbyist said. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
The NRA testified, under oath, in favor of the nation’s first federal gun control bill.
Eighty years later, the organization believes not only in “the general practice of carrying weapons” but also, as Ronald Reagan once wrote, that the Second Amendment “appears to leave little if any leeway for the gun control advocate.”
The NRA’s dramatic turnabout, and its decades-long campaign to change American hearts, minds and gun laws, is the subject of Michael Waldman’s compelling new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography”. Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at the New York University School of Law, explains that the authors of the Second Amendment never intended to create an “unregulated individual right to a gun” and explores why, today, we think they did. Published three days before the rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that killed six and wounded 13, the book shows how we got to this moment of routine gun violence — and offers a way out.
The Founders, it turns out, didn’t spend a lot of time discussing the Second Amendment. Skeptical of standing armies, their interest was in protecting “well-regulated” state militias; the phrase “keep and bear arms” was, at the time, a military reference. Scour James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, the states’ ratification debates and the markup of the Bill of Rights in the House of Representatives, as Waldman did, and, “with a few scattered exceptions,” you won’t find “a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation.”
Thus, for two centuries, the mainstream understanding of the Second Amendment was that it had to do not with an individual’s unregulated right to a gun but rather with the citizen-soldiers who would comprise a militia. There were plenty of guns in the United States, but those were subjected to restrictions that were widely accepted as both reasonable and essential.
Then, at the NRA’s 1977 national convention, gun advocates staged what came to be known as the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” replacing the group’s leadership with ideological extremists intent on building a political movement to fight even modest gun regulations and promote their revisionist view of the Second Amendment.
NRA-backed lawyers quietly and consistently churned out law review articles and pseudo-scholarship questioning 200 years of legal understanding. They shamelessly built up a self-referential body of work riddled with historical errors. Over time, these “scholars” toiling at the fringe were joined by a few leading academics, who lent some measure of respectability to this interpretation.
The gun lobby also engaged in a concerted public campaign, not to mention political manipulation. It was so successful that by the time the issue reached the Supreme Court in 2008, “the desired new doctrine fell like a ripe apple from the tree.” In its rotten 5 to 4 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, the majority ruled for the first time ever that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a gun.
The crucial lesson is that the gun lobby’s triumph was not judge-driven; it was judge-ratified. For all of the legitimate frustration with the court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, the real obstacle to sensible gun control is not judicial inflexibility but a lack of political courage. What we need is a sustained, multi-pronged effort to reframe the public debate and pressure our elected leaders into action.
The right’s long, assiduous and destructive march through the courts and the court of public opinion has, perversely, illuminated a path forward for their opponents. Constitutional change happens not by judicial fiat but through a broader dialogue with the other branches of government and, most important, with the people they represent.
That’s why we don’t necessarily need to revise the syntactic mess that is the Second Amendment, as former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens proposed. Cass Sunstein and others have pointed out that “the Court’s rulings continue to leave flexibility to state and federal governments.” Indeed, since the Heller decision, the courts have upheld many gun regulations.
Americans clearly support common-sense regulations; 90 percent support background checks for gun ownership. But because that support hasn’t translated into political action, 90 percent of Senate Republicans opposed a bill to expand background checks. The pleas of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shot by a madman at a congressional event in 2011, and the grieving parents of 20 schoolchildren slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., could not pry their votes, or their consciences, from the NRA’s cold hands. What we need is a movement of everyday Americans who believe in sane gun laws to stand up with the most vocal advocates at the forefront and replicate the passion and intensity of NRA activists.
The NRA demonstrated the power of a long, full jurisprudential campaign. It’s time to use their own weapon against them.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 3, 2014
“The NRA Game Plan”: Blame Violence On Anything But Guns
The NRA will let one week go by and then they’ll issue a statement about the Elliot Rodger shootings in Santa Barbara. Actually, they’ll issue two statements which they always have ready to go. First they’ll say that the slaughter shows that the mental health system is ‘broken’ and needs to be ‘fixed.’ Then they’ll say that a ‘good guy’ with a gun would have stopped the ‘bad guy,’ and they’ll remind everyone that Concealed Carry Weapons (CCW) legislation is impossible to get in California so there are no ‘good guys’ walking around in Isla Vista anyway.
The truth is that neither statement is true and or ever been true. But they sound like they’re true, which gets the NRA off the hook. They can promote gun sales all they want but also come down on the side of safety and responsibility because it’s the mental health system that needs to be fixed, right?
Last week Dr. Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry, explained that the link between mental illness and violence is tenuous at best and accounts for less than 5% of overall violence at worst. Which means that if every nut lost his guns, the 10,000+ gun homicides we endure each year would drop by a whole, big 500 or so. Wow — talk about ending gun violence by ‘fixing’ the mental health system. Some fix.
As for all those ‘good guys’ walking around with guns, the FBI says there are roughly 300 justifiable homicides each year, a number that hasn’t changed even with the CCW upsurge in the past year. Yeah, yeah, every year armed citizens ‘prevent’ millions of crimes just by waving their guns around in the air. I also know that Martians actually did land in Parrump.
The self-satisfied folks who really believe that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’ simply refuse to accept the fact that if you pick up a gun, point it at someone else and pull the trigger, that the result is going to be very serious injuries or loss of life. There is no other way, including running over someone with a car, that has such a devastating effect. The NRA gets around that problem by promoting, with an almost mystical reverence, the notion of using guns for self defense. John Lott’s nonsense to the contrary, there is absolutely no evidence which proves that guns save more lives than they destroy.
Now don’t get me wrong. If you’re already sending a comment about how Mike The Gun Guy is really Mike The Anti-Gun Guy, why don’t you save the HP comment screeners a little time and at least wait until you read this entire blog? Because believe it or not, I’m not anti-gun. I have said again and again that 99.9% of all gun owners are safe and responsible with their guns. I have also said, but it bears repeating, that we should be able to figure out how to end gun violence without making lawful and careful gun owners jump through more legal hoops, including expanded background checks.
This morning I received an email from one of the largest internet gun-sellers who is dumping new, name-brand AR-15s for under 600 bucks. These are guns that were selling for twice that much a year ago and, as the email warned, “any sudden media attention to political situations, restrictive laws and regulations can drive prices through the roof again overnight.”
The gun industry sits on the horns of a dilemma. They can moan and groan all they want about gun control but it is high-profile shootings that ignite the debate which then leads to stronger sales. The NRA claims that it’s all about safe gun ownership but let’s not make it too safe. Because if we do, it will be more than just a couple of Tea Party politicians giving away free AR-15s.
By: Mike Weisser, The Huffington Post Blog, June 2, 2014
“Another Idiot With A Gun”: A Sign Of How Out-Of-Control The Gun-Owning Fetish Has Become
One of the many problems with the growing normalization of gun ownership is that a growing number of idiots will want to buy and keep guns for no particularly good reason, and a subset of those idiots will go on to kill people.
Witness the latest horror story, in which an 11-year-old New Jersey boy, Hunter Pederson, was shot dead by his uncle, Chad Olm.
Mr. Olm said Hunter and Mr. Olm’s son asked to see his collection of firearms. So he obligingly whipped out three guns, including a Glock 27 .40-caliber pistol with a laser sight. (Why Mr. Olm felt he needed such a weapon, or such an attachment, has not been explained, probably because there is no satisfying answer.)
After showing his 11-year-old nephew a deadly weapon with a laser sight, he turned on the sight, putting a red dot on the boy’s forehead. For laughs, or something. Mr. Olm said Hunter reached for the gun, and it went off, hitting him above the eye.
Mr. Olm said he keeps his guns unloaded (obviously not), but that he had not checked to make sure before he aimed one at a small boy’s head.
Mr. Olm was arrested and is facing charges of criminal homicide, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children.
Anyone with the slightest shred of sense knows that you check weapons for chambered rounds before you put them away — not when you’re showing them off — and that you should never point a gun at anyone unless you think you might need to shoot.
(My wife comes from a gun-owning family. When she was growing up her father would become enraged if any of his kids pointed so much as a plastic toy pistol at someone.)
Before the comments start piling up from the anti-gun control crowd, I am not saying that all guns should be outlawed or that a better background-check system would necessarily have prevented this senseless death.
But the killing of Hunter is a sign of how out-of-control the gun-owning fetish has become, and how little it has to do with anything the writers of the Constitution envisioned.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, May 6, 2014
“Speaking Volumes About The GOP”: Does John McCain Care More About Deaths in Syria Than Gun Violence in America?
Please read these two statistics and notice your emotional reaction to them. Do they make you angry? Do they make you eager for government action? When you digest these roughly equivalent numbers, do they stir you equally?
- A Human Rights groups says more than 150,000 civilians, rebels, and members of the Syrian military have been killed in the nation’s three-year conflict.
- A U.S. gun-control group says more than 100,000 Americans are shot every year in murders, assaults, suicides, and suicide attempts and accidents.
For Sen. John McCain, the hawkish Republican senator from Arizona, the first number makes him spitting mad, literally—as judged Wednesday from my front-row seat at the Harvard Institute of Politics forum, where he answered questions from a moderator and students.
“The Syrian decision has reverberated around the globe,” McCain said, linking President Obama’s blurred red line over Syria to aggressiveness from Russia, China, and Iran. He dismissed suggestions that Americans are war-weary—noting that Ronald Reagan grew the U.S. military in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War—and harshly criticized Obama for dithering on calls to arm Syrian rebels.
Visions of the dead and dying, women and children, lined in the streets after chemical attacks, keep him awake at night, McCain said.
“I am emotional,” declared the infamously temperamental senator, his face reddening with anger. “I’m guilty. I’m emotional.”
Contrast that reaction to the one a few minutes later when a Harvard student pressed McCain on gun control. With a shrug of his shoulders, the two-time presidential candidate noted that he had supported a bill that would have required background checks on all commercial sales of guns. It failed in the Senate.
His tone, passionate and aggressive on Syria, turned professorial and passive-aggressive on guns, as McCain explained that while the U.S. Constitution protects the right to bear arms, gun violence is “an emotional issue.” Congress needs to grapple with the issue somehow, he said, noticeably uncomfortable with his wishy-washiness.
“I know that’s not a good answer,” McCain said, “I wrestle with it all the time.”
So this is how McCain reacts to those two sets of numbers: Go to war for Syrians. Wrestle for America.
Disclosure: I briefly considered working for McCain in 2007, and respect his service to the nation as well as his willingness to compromise with Democrats. On the other hand, I opposed intervention in Syria, support gun regulations, and object to the policies and tactics of the NRA.
And so as McCain hemmed and hawed on gun violence, I turned to the person sitting next to me, Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., and whispered, “Where’s the emotion he showed on Syria?” Kennedy nodded.
The contrast of emotion may speak as much about the Republican Party as it does about McCain. The GOP is lurching so far to the right that this Arizona conservative is considered a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only, and there is no room for commonsense policies that uphold the Second Amendment while curbing gun violence.
After supporting one war fought on false pretenses in Iraq, McCain is still rattling U.S. sabers over the deaths of 150,000 Syrians in three years. Normally, that would hardly be notable: McCain, after all, is a consistent interventionist. But laid against the shootings of 100,000 Americans annually, McCain’s peculiar lack of emotion about gun violence seemed to speak to the sorry state of U.S. politics. And made me sad.
By: Ron Fournier, The National Journal, April 28, 2014
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