“Guns In Bars, What Could Go Wrong?”: Let’s Hope It Makes Southern White Guys Feel Manlier
Georgia’s new law allows them everywhere—in libraries, at school—and permits felons to claim a Stand Your Ground defense. Let’s hope it makes Southern white guys feel manlier, at least.
To paraphrase a former National Rifle Association president, “You finally did it! You maniacs!”
That’s right, on Wednesday, in a fit of perfectly logical preparation for Sherman’s next march to the sea, Peach State Gov. Nathan Deal went ahead and signed a gun bill. Not just any gun bill, mind you, but one with so much stupid in it, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been renamed Bieber or Gohmert.
We discussed this “guns everywhere” and “felons have the right to shoot you” bill in this space only last month, but now that it’s law in the land of cotton—old times they are not forgotten—perhaps it’s time for a refresher course.
The legislation will allow guns in places of worship, sporting events, bars, and yes, schools. Clearly they’ve learned nothing since Newtown, or since any of the approximately 50 school shootings—more than three a month—in the last 17 months. Of course those attacks happened because those schools were “gun-free zones.” We can’t go blaming the easy access to guns for any yahoo with a Ted Cruz tattoo, which is clearly why we’re seeing the same epidemic of school shootings in, say, the Netherlands or Australia.
It’s the logic that gave us such successful past plans as putting more drunk drivers on the highways to cut down on accidents or electing George W. Bush to improve on the Clinton years.
You gotta give Gov. Deal and the state Legislature some credit, though. It was a nice touch, allowing Georgians to bring guns into libraries, too, which is where I think they’re keeping armored cars full of money these days in the Empire State of the South. Also, lord knows when you might not be able to reach that book on Tupperware on the top shelf—but hell, if you can load it full of enough lead, it may well fall down of its own accord.
Problem solved!
As a reminder, the Georgia bill also gives criminals—who are barred by law from possessing guns but still allowed easy access to them on the secondary market by bought-off legislators—to claim a Stand Your Ground defense in court.
Because why shouldn’t a portly, addle-brained white guy wearing an “I’m with stupid” T-shirt who likes to hit his wife not be able to buy a firearm at a gun show with no questions asked? Also, why shouldn’t he or she (but mostly he) be able to shoot you because he was “scared” you looked like you were in the “wrong” neighborhood?
That, of course, is what the new law is really about. It allows Southern white guys to “feel so manly, when armed,”superior to “others” who won’t be able to use Stand Your Ground as a defense and aren’t afraid to crawl out from under their bed without an AR-15 like Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s foaming mouthpiece and executive vice president. (Isn’t he a little too French to be allowed to carry? Just sayin’.)
Based on a bastardized version of the Second Amendment, Georgia’s new law also allows a modern industrialized society to become a shooting gallery—one that only serves to enrich American arms dealers who not only don’t care a whit about American bloodshed but welcome it as part of their business model. There’s a word for that. It rhymes with “hater.”
In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens laid out what the Second Amendment meant to historians and jurists who use common sense and intellect to arrive at their findings.
Laws like the one in Georgia have zero to do with the Second Amendment, Stevens wrote, unless you think the next Whiskey Rebellion or Battle of Lake Erie is likely to commence at a preschool in Athens or spring forth from a garden party in Savannah.
But the Hollywood Hillbillies sure are gonna be stoked when they return home during the offseason from the Polanski-esque plot twists that must define their reality show.
Otherwise, here’s what we’re talking about in layman’s terms. This bill, passed by greedy, slack-jawed Georgia legislators and signed by the Right as rain Mr. Deal, isn’t just about guns but the same toxic brew of anarchy, resentment, and white privilege that led Justice Antonin Scalia to encourage sedition in between attacks on voting rights and affirmative action. That leads Cliven Bundy, the taker occupying public land in Nevada—and primo space on the wall of Sean Hannitys man-cave—to threaten violence against the federal government unless he gets, as Mitt Romney once put it—totally coincidentally!—to the NAACP, “free stuff.”
It doesn’t matter to extremist officeholders in Georgia that the vast majority of Georgians and every law enforcement organization oppose this crazy bill, much as it doesn’t matter to the rodeo clown, right-wing Republicans trying to burn down Congress what most of us around the country want them to do. It also doesn’t matter that this legislation flies in the face of all public health statistics, common sense, and modernity. Or that more people will now die.
In fact, that’s the point.
They have a war to fight that didn’t end at The Appomattox Courthouse. And it seems to be getting less civil all the time.
By: Cliff Schecter, The Daily Beast, April 24, 2014
“An Industry Stands In The Way”: Today’s NRA, A Gun Industry Trade Association Masquerading As A Shooting Sports Foundation
When the National Rifle Association holds its annual meeting next week in Indianapolis, it is inevitable that its leaders will demonize Michael Bloomberg and decry his $50 million investment in support of gun violence prevention. Yet throughout the convention there will be signs of the N.R.A.’s own multimillion-dollar donors: America’s gun industry. And that’s because today’s N.R.A. is, in reality, nothing more than a gun industry trade association masquerading as a shooting sports foundation. The organization’s agenda is increasingly focused on one goal: selling more guns.
Since 2005, as detailed in the Violence Policy Center’s 2013 study “Blood Money II: How Gun Industry Dollars Fund the NRA,” contributions from gun industry “corporate partners” to the N.R.A. have reached between $19.3 million and $60.2 million (the range is due to the giving levels defined within the N.R.A. donor program).
One of the N.R.A.’s corporate partners is Freedom Group, now rebranded as Remington Outdoor Company, manufacturer of the Bushmaster assault rifle used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Another is Smith & Wesson, manufacturer of the semiautomatic assault rifle used in the July 2012 mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and the pistol used in the recent Fort Hood shooting.
Just last month, during a visit to the company’s headquarters, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. executive vice president, was presented with a $600,000 check from Smith & Wesson’s chief executive, James Debney, who, in a company press release extolling the gift and lauding the N.R.A., stated: “Through its various programs, pro-gun reform legislation, and grass-roots efforts, the existence of the N.R.A. is crucial to the preservation of the shooting sports and to the entire firearms industry.”
The N.R.A. relies on these “corporate partners” for financial and ideological support. The victims of this lethal partnership are the businesses and institutions where shootings take place almost routinely — workplaces, shopping malls, theaters, schools and universities. Instead of, for the most part, remaining on the sidelines, these commercial and institutional entities should take a stand on preventing gun violence.
By: Josh Sugarman, Executive Director, Violence Policy Center; The New York Times, April 17, 2014
“Grading John Paul Stevens’ Work”: When Rewriting The Second Amendment, Be As Specific As Possible
As the gun nuts will surely point out, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens doesn’t know how to distinguish automatic from semi-automatic firearms. I’ve never understood why this distinction is so important to gun nuts. As a legal matter, obviously it is important to know the difference. But the reason that non-gun enthusiasts make this mistake so often is because the semi-automatic weapons are so incredibly lethal that the distinction doesn’t make any practical difference to them. Does anyone think Adam Lanza’s semi-automatic weapon was inadequate to the job of killing 20 kids and 6 teachers in a couple of minutes?
It’s really the ease and quickness that killers like Lanza and James Eagan Jones Holmes (the Aurora, Colorado shooter) can mow down large groups of people that is the concern.
In any case, Stevens’ proposed amendment to the Second Amendment is sloppy. It would make it impossible for a National Guard officer to disarm an insubordinate underling.
As a result of the rulings in Heller and McDonald, the Second Amendment, which was adopted to protect the states from federal interference with their power to ensure that their militias were “well regulated,” has given federal judges the ultimate power to determine the validity of state regulations of both civilian and militia-related uses of arms. That anomalous result can be avoided by adding five words to the text of the Second Amendment to make it unambiguously conform to the original intent of its draftsmen. As so amended, it would read:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”
As we know, the wording of these things can get twisted over time. So, if you want to rewrite the Second Amendment you should be as specific as possible. I’d go with:
A well regulated Militia is no longer necessary to the security of a free State. We now call those things the Army Reserve, the Navy Reserve, the Marine Corps Reserve, the Air Force Reserve, the Coast Guard Reserve, the Army National Guard of the United States, and the Air National Guard of the United States. If you serve in one of those Organizations, your weapon will be provided for you.
See, isn’t that better?
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 13, 2014
“Yet Again, Money Influencing Politics”: How The Gun Lobby Became A Threat To Public Safety
Just a generation ago, the NRA was a nonpartisan and relatively non-ideological organization that advocated for responsible and safe gun ownership in addition to defending gun rights.
But in its 20 years under the leadership of chief executive Wayne LaPierre the organization has become another cog in the broader conservative advocacy machine.
At the same time, with gun ownership declining, the organization has come to rely less on its members’ dues and more on firearm manufacturers, which now account for over half of the NRA’s revenues according to Walter Hickey at Business Insider.
The gun lobby also lost a key element of what had long been its defining mission: Guns remain a hot-button topic for political debate, but in the courts the issue has largely been settled. Gun rights won.
In 2010, the Supreme Court settled a long-standing debate about whether the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to bear arms or only applied to, as the Constitution reads, “a well-regulated militia.” The court ruled that the right to own firearms, while not without limits, is as integral as the right to free speech or the free exercise of religion. Since then, a number of municipal bans on firearm ownership have been overturned — most recently when a federal court struck down a California law that allowed counties to restrict the concealed carry of guns.
But the gun makers’ lobby remains strong and well-financed, and it has an institutional imperative to keep lobbying. It is now in the business of selling guns by promoting the idea that we can never have too many, nor should there be any public places where firearms aren’t welcome — and by spinning conspiracy theories about various imagined plots to disarm law-abiding Americans.
Today, the NRA and its political allies promote such policies as allowing concealed weapons in bars, allowing the blind to carry firearms (“Blind gun user Michael Barber said: ‘When you shoot a gun, you take it out and point and shoot, and I don’t necessarily think eyesight is necessary’”), making it a felony for doctors to discuss gun safety with their patients (never mind the First Amendment) and barring private firms from telling their employees to keep their guns at home.
Pro-gun lawmakers have gotten the message. Last month, five Republican legislators in Washington State introduced a bill that would exempt all firearms and ammunition from the state’s sales tax. Now in theory at least, one reason for tax breaks is to encourage some social good. For example, 20 years of tax credits have played a role in the exponential increase of wind energy production in the US. Yet here was a proposed tax break that would only encourage the sale of more guns in a country that’s already bristling with them.
These laws are predicated on the belief that more guns make a society safer. One of the cosponsors of the Washington State bill, Matt Shea (R-Spokane Valley) told a local conservative talk radio host, “It’s beyond a shadow of a doubt: More firearms in a society cuts crime in that society.” (In fact, according to the UN, the US is believed to lead the world in private gun ownership and has the highest total crime rate among wealthy countries.)
Kentucky lawmakers proposed a similar measure back in December, and in Kansas, the belief that more guns mean more safety forms the basis of a law that only permits local officials to bar firearms from public buildings if they install costly metal detectors or hire security guards. In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley is backing a law that would allow people to carry concealed guns without a permit or any safety training.
The problem is that this faith in guns for security, like global warming denialism, flies in the face of a mountain of serious, peer-reviewed research.
Last month, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study conducted by epidemiologists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) finding that access to a firearm makes an individual almost twice as likely to become the victim of a homicide and three times more likely to commit suicide.
Previous studies had found that countries with higher rates of gun ownership also have higher rates of gun deaths and that states with more guns have higher homicide rates. But gun advocates dismissed those studies because they didn’t account for illegal gun sales. (The National Rifle Association’s side of the scholarly debate rests largely on the discredited and allegedly fraudulent work of economist John Lott.)
The UCSF study took a different approach, starting with a dead body and working backwards to see whether that person owned or had access to a firearm, legal or illegal. The study was a meta-analysis combining data from 15 previous, peer-reviewed papers.
It also found a significant gender gap in terms of homicide: Men with access to a gun were 29 percent more likely to be a victim of homicide, while women with a gun close at hand were almost three times more likely to be murdered. The report cited previous studies that found that most female murder victims knew their assailant, and three-quarters of women killed with a gun died in their own homes. Researchers concluded that the presence of guns may make impulsive killings during domestic disputes more common.
Another soon-to-be-published study may provide the most compelling evidence to date that looser gun laws lead to more bloodshed. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health were able to conduct a natural experiment in Missouri after the state repealed a law requiring handgun purchasers to get a license and pass a background check in 2007. According to the study’s authors, repealing the law “contributed to a sixteen percent increase in Missouri’s murder rate.”
That translated into 55 to 63 more murders per year in Missouri between 2008 and 2012, despite the fact that during the same period, “none of the states bordering Missouri experienced significant increases in murder rates and the U.S. murder rate actually declined by over five percent.” The increase in murders began in the first full year after the state’s licensing requirement was repealed, and the researchers “controlled for changes in policing, incarceration, burglaries, unemployment, poverty, and other state laws adopted during the study period that could affect violent crime.”
The conclusions presented in these studies, along with previous research, fly in the face of the persistent claim that more guns make a society safer. But this is as much a story of money influencing politics as anything else. With supporters like Springfield Armory, Inc, Pierce Bullet, Seal Target Systems, Beretta USA Corporation, Sturm Rugar & Co and Smith & Wesson, public safety simply isn’t a high priority for the gun lobby.
By: Joshua Holland, Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers Blog, March 4, 2014
“Lethal But Legal”: Rethinking Our ‘Rights’ To Dangerous Behaviors
In the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that food companies engineer hyperprocessed foods in ways precisely geared to most appeal to our tastes. This technologically advanced engineering is done, of course, with the goal of maximizing profits, regardless of the effects of the resulting foods on consumer health, natural resources, the environment or anything else.
But the issues go way beyond food, as the City University of New York professor Nicholas Freudenberg discusses in his new book, “Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health.” Freudenberg’s case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls “the corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.
It sounds creepy; it is creepy. But it’s also plain to see. Yes, it’s unlikely there’s a cabal that sits down and asks, “How can we kill more kids tomorrow?” But Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.
All of these industries work hard to defend our “right” — to smoke, feed our children junk, carry handguns and so on — as matters of choice, freedom and responsibility. Their unified line is that anything that restricts those “rights” is un-American.
Yet each industry, as it (mostly) legally can, designs products that are difficult to resist and sometimes addictive. This may be obvious, if only in retrospect: The food industry has created combinations that most appeal to our brains’ instinctual and learned responses, although we were eating those foods long before we realized that. It may be hidden (and borderline illegal), as when tobacco companies upped the nicotine quotient of tobacco. Sometimes, as Freudenberg points out, the appeals may be subtle: Knowing full well that S.U.V.’s were less safe and more environmentally damaging than standard cars, manufacturers nevertheless marketed them as safer, appealing to our “unconscious ‘reptilian instincts’ for survival and reproduction and to advertise S.U.V.’s as both protection against crime and unsafe drivers and as a means to escape from civilization.”
The problems are clear, but grouping these industries gives us a better way to look at the struggle of consumers, of ordinary people, to regain the upper hand. The issues of auto and gun safety, of drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction, and of hyperconsumption of unhealthy food are not as distinct as we’ve long believed; really, they’re quite similar. For example, the argument for protecting people against marketers of junk food relies in part on the fact that antismoking regulations and seatbelt laws were initially attacked as robbing us of choice; now we know they’re lifesavers.
Thus the most novel and interesting parts of Freudenberg’s book are those that rephrase the discussion of rights and choice, because we need more than seatbelt and antismoking laws, more than a few policies nudging people toward better health. Until now (and, sadly, perhaps well into the future), corporations have been both more nimble and more flush with cash than the public health arms of government. “What we need,” Freudenberg said to me, “is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to profit at the expense of public health.”
Redefining the argument may help us find strategies that can actually bring about change. The turning point in the tobacco wars was when the question changed from the industry’s — “Do people have the right to smoke?” — to that of public health: “Do people have the right to breathe clean air?” Note that both questions are legitimate, but if you address the first (to which the answer is of course “yes”) without asking the second (to which the answer is of course also “yes”) you miss an opportunity to convert the answer from one that leads to greater industry profits to one that has literally cut smoking rates in half.
Similarly, we need to be asking not “Do junk food companies have the right to market to children?” but “Do children have the right to a healthy diet?” (In Mexico, the second question has been answered positively. Shamefully, we have yet to take that step.) The question is not only, “Do we have a right to bear arms?” but also “Do we have the right to be safe in our streets and schools?” In short, says Freudenberg: “The right to be healthy trumps the right of corporations to promote choices that lead to premature death and preventable illnesses. Protecting public health is a fundamental government responsibility; a decent society should not allow food companies to convince children to buy food that’s bad for them or to encourage a lifetime of unhealthy eating.”
Oddly, these are radical notions. But aren’t they less “un-American” than allowing a company to maximize its return on investment by looking to sell to children or healthy adults in ways that will cause premature mortality? As Freudenberg says, “Shouldn’t science and technology be used to improve human well-being, not to advance business goals that harm health?” Two other questions that can be answered “yes.”
By: Mark Bittman, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, February 26, 2014
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