“Not Just An Abstract Idea”: Want To Make Buying Guns Hard? Make It As Tough As Getting An Abortion
It’s not just an abstract idea. It’s a bill going through the state house in Missouri. Mandatory evaluations. Mandatory talks with local leaders. Mandatory accountability. One state rep wants it to happen—and soon.
Hours before shots rang out in San Bernardino, California, leaving 14 dead and 21 injured, Missouri State Rep. Stacey Newman introduced a bill with a simple premise:
What if the process to buy guns in America was as difficult as the one to get an abortion?
A flight crew member turned political consultant, Newman was inspired to run for office after watching her daughter Sophie, then 6, talk about guns and kids on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. After founding a statewide political action committee called Harriet’s List, she was elected to office in 2009, where she’s built a reputation of being tough on firearms.
Her Twitter bio, beneath a pink StandWithPP picture, describes her as: “wife, Mom, Nana, obsessive about reproductive justice, voters rights, women’s rights, equality & of course—gun violence prevention.”
Her bill, first reported on by St. Louis Magazine, isn’t modeled after the general restrictions to getting an abortion in America, but her state’s specifically. Missouri has some of the toughest in the nation. Missouri is one of just a few states operating with fewer than five abortion clinics, and one of four that enforces a 72-hour waiting period.
Beyond the difficulty of getting an abortion in Missouri, Newman’s bill was likely inspired by the level of firearm violence in her state. In 2010 Missouri’s rate of homicide, 5.6 per 100,000 people, was 56 percent higher than the national average—making it the fourth-highest in the nation. Gun deaths in the state have surpassed motor vehicle fatalities since 2013.
When The Daily Beast asked Newman for the impetus behind the bill, she replied, “utter frustration.”
“We were at our wit’s end,” she said. After spending 15 years arguing against guns the traditional way, she decided to get creative.
This bill, she knows, will never get a hearing, much less approved. That’s not the point.
“I’m on the defense team, I understand that,” she said. “A lot of my job is getting the word out there.”
Using an unconventional bill to raise awareness for an issue is a move she’s tried before. In 2012, she introduced a bill that would prohibit men from getting vasectomies unless the procedure was meant to prevent serious injury or death.
After the story gained traction this year, Newman decided to try the radical method again—this time using an issue for which conservatives have an “endless appetite”: abortion access.
There is only one abortion clinic in the entire state. There are at least 3,000 places to buy guns. But what if those numbers were reversed? From attending the funeral of a gun victim under 18, to watching videos of fatal firearm injuries, here is what it would look like if buying a gun in Missouri was as difficult as getting an abortion.
Prior to any firearm purchase in this state, a prospective firearm shall:
— Confer and discuss with a licensed physician the indicators and contraindicators and risk factors, including any physical, psychological, or situational factors, that may arise with the proposed firearm purchase at a firearm dealer located at least 120 miles from the purchaser’s legal residence.
— Submit to an evaluation for the physician to search the individual for indicators and contraindicators and risk factors and determine if such firearm purchase would increase the purchaser’s risk of experiencing an adverse physical, emotional, or other health reaction.
— Listen to oral statement regarding the risks associated with the purchase as well as read and sign a written statement that includes the following:
1. The name and license number of the licensed firearm dealer.
2. The immediate and long-term medical risks associated with firearms, along with medical descriptions and photographs of fatal firearm injuries, as collected by emergency pediatric medical professionals, law enforcement, and prosecutors’ offices.
3. Alternatives to purchasing a firearm, which shall include materials about peaceful and nonviolent conflict resolution.
4. A statement that the dealer is available to answer any questions concerning the purchase of a firearm, together with the telephone number of the dealer that the dealer may be reached to answer any questions the purchaser may have.
5. The prospective firearm purchaser shall obtain written consent of his or her parents in order to qualify for the purchase of any firearm.
— Watch a 30-minute video on fatal firearm injuries, as collected by urban medical professionals, law enforcement, and local prosecutors, and verify in writing he or she viewed the entire video in the presence of a licensed firearm dealer.
— Verify in writing by a licensed physician that the purchaser has toured an emergency trauma center in the nearest qualified urban hospital on a weekend between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. when gun violence victims are present.
— Within 72 hours of a firearm purchase, the prospective firearm purchaser meet with at least two families who have been victims of violence involving a firearm and two local faith leaders who have officiated, within the past year, a funeral of a victim of violence involving a firearm who was under the age of eighteen.
Perhaps if these measures were in place, Newman suggests, some of the more than 32,000 people who die from gun violence in the U.S. each year would be saved. It’s a sentiment echoed eloquently in a now-viral Facebook post by Brian Murtagh, who suggested (like Newman) that we treat young men who want to buy guns the same as we treat women who want an abortion.
“Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun,” he writes. “It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?”
With 20 to 30 abortion bills filed each year, Newman wants to capitalize on the momentum. Mirroring the restrictions for abortion access, she says, allowed her to show the “ridiculousness” of both the pro-gun lobby and the pro-life one.
“If this is one way that I can influence a voter to keep this their number one issue, then it’s something,” she said. “It’s something.”
Correction 12/4/15 3:45 p.m.: A previous version of this article stated that Missouri had two abortion clinics. It has one.
By: Abby Haglage, The Daily Beast, December 4, 2015
“Prayers Are Not Enough”: Your ‘Prayers’ Should Be For Forgiveness If You Do Nothing – Again
In October, following a deadly mass shooting in Oregon, a visibly angry President Obama delivered a message from the White House: “[T]houghts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America, next week or a couple of months from now.”
Two months and one day later, an even deadlier mass shooting unfolded in Southern California, prompting Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to take the president’s sentiment about “thoughts and prayers” a little further. “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage,” the senator said on Twitter. “Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing – again.”
Whether Murphy intended to cause a stir or not, his message sparked some criticism. The Hill published a piece under the headline, “Dem senator criticizes post-shooting ‘prayers.’”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) says people who pray for the victims of shootings should be asking for forgiveness for their inaction. […]
Murphy drew criticism from users on Twitter who said his remarks were “offensive” and demeaning toward religious people.
I think this badly misses the point of an important sentiment. Murphy can certainly speak for himself, but the “prayers are not enough” argument generally has nothing to do with criticizing prayer or those who worship. It has everything to do with the idea that extending thoughts and prayers should be the start, not the end, of a constructive conversation about reducing gun violence.
In other words, when politicians – officials who can take steps to save lives through effective policymaking – offer thoughts and prayers after mass shootings, it’s fine, but it’s also inadequate. The sentiment warrants a follow-up question: “The thoughts and prayers are appreciated, but what’s next?”
If the answer is, “We’ll offer more thoughts and prayers after the next mass shooting,” the response isn’t enough.
The New Republic’s Elizabeth Bruenig made an interesting observation yesterday when highlighting Twitter responses to the San Bernardino shooting from the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.
If you’re keeping score, that’s prayers, luck, and blessings from Republicans, and gun policy prescriptions from Democrats. One hundred and forty characters isn’t much, to be fair, but I can think of at least one way to split the difference: praying for the strength and wisdom to fix our heinously broken gun policy, for starters.
And that’s ultimately what this is about. I haven’t seen any politicians or public officials suggest people shouldn’t extend thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families, but there seems to be some disagreement over what should follow the well-wishes.
For their part, congressional Democrats have vowed to continue pushing policy measures intended to curtail gun violence and congressional Republicans will very likely continue to reject those proposals reflexively, just as they did this week.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 5, 2015
“What Will We Do After The Next Slaughter?: Shut Up About San Bernardino, Because There’s Nothing Left To Say
The right and the left have both issued verdicts on what not to say after a mass shooting.
The right ridicules calls for gun-safety measures. The left mocks what it perceives to be hollow nostrums about “thoughts and prayers.” I think they’re both right. I think it’s time to say nothing at all.
I realized this when I discovered the most trenchant thing I’d read about San Bernardino—noting that Sandy Hook didn’t begin a national conversation about guns so much as end it—was actually written about the murders at the Emanuel AME Church.
There is no way to overdramatize the speed with which San Bernardino followed Colorado Springs; it happened too fast for hyperbole. There wasn’t even time for an idea to be proposed, much less fail. Columns written about Richard Dear are still being published even as we hunt for answers about the massacre farther west.
Sure, the particular gruesomeness of this crime—at a center for the disabled—seems like it might be enough to…what? What about this crime will shove the graceless leviathan of our national consciousness from the sludge-gummed track we’ve developed to deal with what should be unspeakable, unthinkable, at very fucking least rare?
In the hours after the California killings, heavy traffic crashed a mass shooter database. Which is more horrifying—that so many people needed the information, or that there was so much information to be had?
We have reached the point where mass shootings have a “news consumer handbook,” where the most helpful journalistic tool in covering a killing isn’t local sources so much as search-and-replace: Newsweek reporter Polly Mosendz keeps a pre-written mass shooter story fresh in her text editing files. “A mass shooting has been reported at TK, where TK people are believed to be dead and TK more are injured, according to TK police department,” it says. “The gunman has/hasn’t been apprehended.”
So I propose a columnist strike, a hot take moratorium, a sound-bite freeze. The only response that could possibly match this gut-punching tragedy isn’t made up of words but silence.
I envision blank blog posts, empty sets, magazine pages slick and white from edge to edge. I want to open up The Washington Post or The New York Times and find the grainy gray of naked newspaper stock in place of columnists’ prose.
Let’s fill Twitter with dead space and leave Facebook with a total absence of “likes.”
Let the cable talking heads mute themselves.
Hear in that noiselessness the echo all the prayers and the pleas, all the policy proposals and screeds that were written about the last mass shooting, and the one before that and the one before the one before that. Hear the thundering clap of absolute inaction in Congress, and the crazed, giddy titter of those loosening gun laws state by state. Hear the voices that don’t speak, that can’t, the conversations some families will never get to have.
What I want is not a “national moment of silence,” nor really a prayer. I don’t wish to summon contemplation or reflection but choking sobs and knotted throats. I want to share with the world the wordless groan that is the only prayer the grieving have.
I want a strike, a shutdown, a refusal to move. Not just inaction as a pause—rather, stillness as an action in itself.
I don’t think what I want to happen actually can happen, not in this world. The media machine inexorably churns and, less reflexively, our mutual ache and mourning demands recognition on screens and off.
Then again, our suspension of discussion doesn’t have to last forever. I don’t want to create a vacuum so much as create awareness about how much has already been said.
There’s nothing left to say, so let’s just not say it.
I write this, my fingers cold and my heart broken and hesitating before I press “send.” If I publish this column now, if I let this idea into the world after this slaughter…Why, then, what will we do after the next?
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2015
“Black Guns No Different From Other Sporting Guns”: Court Decision Uses Gun Industry’s Own Fiction To Uphold Assault Rifle Regulations
Right after the Sandy Hook massacre, both New York and Connecticut passed laws that tightened up restrictions on owning ‘black’ guns, a.k.a., the military-style AR rifles like the type Adam Lanza used to kill 26 adults and young kids. The laws basically toughened the earlier assault weapons bans, provoking immediate outcries from the pro-gun gang who challenged the laws based on their inalienable 2nd-Amendment rights. After all, the 2008 Heller decision protected private ownership of all guns that are “in common use,” and what could be more common than AR rifles of which probably more than four million have been manufactured over the last twenty years?
The gun industry began promoting black guns in the 1990s when they realized that hunting and traditional sporting use of guns was dying out. This promotion took two forms: on the one hand creating the fiction that black guns, like all guns protected us from crime; on the other hand creating the equally beguiling fiction that military-style weapons were no different from other, traditional rifles since they could only be fired in semi-automatic mode.
The industry went so far as to create an entirely new shooting tradition, replacing the phrase ‘assault rifle’ with the nomenclature ‘modern sporting rifle’ so as to pretend that an AR-15 is nothing other than the same, old hunting gun that sportsmen have for generations been taking out to the woods. And for those who like to imagine themselves mowing down ISIS or Al Queda in the streets and alleys of Philadelphia or New York, the guns being sold by Bushmaster, Colt, Stag and other black-gun manufacturers are referred to as ‘tactical’ weapons, which everyone knows is simply an assault rifle with a different name.
Both the CT and NY laws were challenged and upheld in District Court; now the Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, has upheld both laws again. What is interesting about this decision, indeed remarkable, is the fact that it is based not just on the government’s authority to regulate guns that are in “common use,” but to regulate these particular types of weapons based on their definition as created and promoted by the gun industry itself! The Circuit Court accepted the notion that black guns are just another type of sporting rifle, and it was the acknowledgement that black guns are no different from other types of sporting guns that ultimately legitimized the assault-rifle bans in Connecticut and New York.
Plaintiffs in this case argued that there were more than four million AR-15 rifles owned by civilians and that these guns, like other civilian weapons, could only be fired in semi-automatic mode. As the Court said, “This much is clear: Americans own millions of the firearms that the challenged legislation prohibits.” Further, the Court also accepted the notion that many Americans keep an AR-15 in their home for self-defense. Given those circumstances, how could the Circuit Court decide that prohibiting civilian ownership of such weapons was not a violation of 2nd-Amendment rights? Because what the Court did was take the gun industry’s own fiction about these guns and stand it on its head.
The industry’s marketing of black guns as ‘sporting’ rifles is based on one thing and one thing only; namely, these weapons can only be shot in semi-auto mode. Never mind that you can deliver up to 60 rounds of ammunition in thirty seconds or less; never mind that the .223 round has a lethality specifically designed to kill or injure human targets; never mind that many military and law enforcement units also deploy the semi-auto gun. That residents in New York and Connecticut can own all kinds of semi-automatic rifles which do not contain certain military-style features means that the ban on AR-style rifles is not a prohibition of semi-automatic weapons at all.
As a noted Supreme Court justice once said, “History also has its claims.” And one of those claims is that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give the gun industry the right to invent a tall tale to justify how it tries to sell guns.
By: Mike Weisser, The Blog, The Huffington Post, October 21, 2015
“A Toddler Shooter Proves The NRA Wrong”: Willfully Endangering Our Children, The NRA Is Clearly Culpable
In a week of things that only happen with guns and in America, add yet another to the list.
In Rock Hill, South Carolina, Americans’ propensity for leaving semi-hidden deadly weaponry around like it’s a Hanukkah present allowed a 2-year-old to grab a .357 revolver and shoot his grandmother in the back.
The toddler’s great-aunt was taking him for a ride in her car, and naturally there was a revolver in the back pouch of the seat in front of him, where he could reach it and shoot his grandmother, who was sitting in the passenger seat.
“There could be some child neglect or some unlawful conduct towards a child charges based on the age of the child and leaving the gun within reaching distance of a young minor,” said Rock Hill Police Chief Mark Bollinger.
The operative phrase is “could be.” If the grandmother or great-aunt had put the toddler in the back without a car seat, you can bet your ass there’d be charges. If they’d put a shot of whiskey in front of him, same deal. Or if they hadn’t fed him or left him in a hot car, or perhaps, if he were five years older, just let him walk less than half a mile to a playground.
But a gun within reach, nah. Not in the America where we’re electing cast members from Buckwild to represent us in Congress. Tea Party ignoramuses think a gun fetish is just a lifestyle choice and National Rifle Association (NRA) bullshit and legalistic bribes are tantamount to Solomonic judgments.
For here again, as with the campus shootings in Oregon, Texas, and Arizona, or the execution of a reporter on live television in Roanoke, Virginia, the NRA is clearly culpable. It has lobbied against every attempt to require that guns be stored with safety locks and told parents not to use them. It fights against the requirement or even existence on the market of smart gun technology that would allow only the owner of the weapon to use it. It has fought mandated training and the kind of personal liability insurance requirement that tends to make people more careful with their deadly weaponry.
No, the NRA pushes on kids its inane Eddie the Eagle, a cartoon character who’s supposed to convince children to get an adult when they see a gun. It’s been proven to work about as well as telling Ted Nugent to bathe. There’s a reason these things don’t happen in other high-income countries, nations not saddled with this group of misanthropic, evolutionary-scale losers operating out of the congressional offices of the vast majority of members of one of our two major parties.
Speaking of this, I have been impressed by President Obama’s reaction to the recent shootings, his righteous anger at those willfully endangering our children. But using everything at your disposal really means using everything at your disposal. So why, then, would his Justice Department award a $2.4 million grant to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s official lobby, which in a cruel twist of irony is located in Newtown, Connecticut?
Handing out gun locks and teaching safety is an obvious good. But can’t you find people better to do it than the yahoos who exist near Sandy Hook and still lobbied against every reform that could have saved kids’ lives after a massacre in their own damn town? Is it possible to be more terrible human beings (I use that term loosely)?
There’s a battle raging. And the NRA is on the wrong side of it, and history as well. It will be demographically extinct within a decade to a decade and a half. But a lot of innocent people can die in that timespan, and it seems determined to make as many as possible pay the price for its ignorance and avarice.
Kids shooting their family members in cars is patently ridiculous, and preventable. It’s just another symptom of a society sick with the NRA virus. We’ve started to get better, as gun owners increasingly realize the NRA leadership is a bunch of batshit nutters and break away to do their own thing. But clearly it’s no time to let up now.
By: Cliff Schecter, The Daily Beast, October 13, 2015
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