“When A Gun Advocate Dissents”: In The Gun World, Straying From The Party Line Leads To Vilification And Condemnation
It’s not as if Dick Metcalf was some kind of gun control fanatic.
On the contrary, he’s a gun guy through and through, such an unyielding defender of the Second Amendment that last year he led the charge to push through a law giving the residents of Pike County, Ill., where he lives, the right to carry concealed guns without a permit. He called the practice “constitutional carry” rather than “concealed carry.”
In the early 1980s, he and a handful of friends started a successful gun club, called the Pike Adams Sportsmen’s Alliance, which is located on Metcalf’s farm in Barry, Ill. A few years later, he played an important role in lobbying for the federal Firearm Owners Protection Act, which loosened many of the gun restrictions that had become law after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. A friend of his told me that Metcalf had even written some of the language in the bill.
Mostly, though, Metcalf, 67, was known as a writer for magazines owned by InterMedia Outdoors, a publisher of gun periodicals that include the industry bible, Guns & Ammo. He did videos on subjects like “Guns for Family Home Defense” and wrote articles with headlines like “Smith & Wesson’s 12 Most Important Guns.”
It is perfectly understandable, then, that the gun world might be a little taken aback by Metcalf’s opinion piece in the December issue of Guns & Ammo calling for some modest gun regulation. “I firmly believe that all U.S. citizens have a right to keep and bear arms,” he wrote, “but I do not believe that they have a right to use them irresponsibly.” The article went on to call for mandatory training for gun owners. That’s all. Such limited regulation, he argued, did not constitute an infringement on anyone’s constitutional rights.
When people like me read an article like that, it seems momentarily possible that gun advocates and gun control advocates might be able to find some common ground. Much in the way that many gun control activists have come to accept the legitimacy of the Second Amendment — something that hasn’t always been the case — here was a man on the other side of the divide saying that some sensible regulation didn’t necessarily lead down a “slippery slope” to confiscation. If we are ever to have a sane gun policy, we desperately need people from both camps to meet somewhere in the middle.
But when people like me see the reaction from gun advocates to Metcalf’s tame proposal, it all seems hopeless again. Robert Farago, who maintains a blog called The Truth About Guns, started the ball rolling by linking to — and denouncing — Metcalf’s “diatribe.” He went on to describe the article as a “bone-headed, uninformed, patently obvious misinterpretation of the Second Amendment.” Other bloggers piled on. On the Guns & Ammo Facebook page, subscribers demanded Metcalf’s head, even as they canceled their subscriptions.
Finally, according to a blog post Metcalf wrote, two major gun manufacturers told InterMedia Outdoors that they would pull all their advertising if something wasn’t done. That’s all it took. Within 24 hours, Metcalf was permanently banned from the company’s publications. And the longtime editor of Guns & Ammo, Jim Bequette, who was planning to retire at the end of the year, was pushed out as well.
Before departing, however, Bequette wrote a groveling apology, which ran on the magazine’s website. He described his decision to publish Metcalf’s article as “a mistake” and took pains to remind readers that Guns & Ammo had always been the hardest of hard-liners. “It is no accident that when others in the gun culture counseled compromise in the past, hard-core thinkers…found a place and a voice in these pages,” he wrote. With that, capitulation was complete.
If you want to understand why so few gun owners are willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association, even though the majority disagree with the N.R.A.’s most extreme positions, here was a vivid example. Straying from the party line leads to vilification and condemnation that would give anybody pause.
My guess is that Dick Metcalf always knew what he was in for — all the more reason writing his article took guts. In the aftermath, he was the only one who could still hold his head up high. On a blog called The Outdoor Wire, he wrote a lengthy response to his critics. He didn’t back down one iota. Describing himself as “disappointed” at the reaction to his article, he added, “If a respected editor can be forced to resign and a controversial writer’s voice be shut down by a one-sided social-media and Internet outcry, virtually overnight, simply because they dared to open a discussion or ask questions about a politically sensitive issue…then I fear for the future of our industry, and for our Cause.”
Maybe there’s hope yet.
By: Joe Nocera, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 8, 2013
“The GOP Mental-Health Hypocrisy”: Obstructing The Law That Does More To Advance The Cause Since ‘You-Know-Who’ Became President
So now we’re being treated to the charming spectacle of Republicans, or a few of them anyway, purporting to care about mental-health treatment in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard shooting. How touching. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they care about mental health. They’re just coming up with something to say in the wake of the tragedy that sounds to the willfully credulous like action and that won’t offend the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, they have devastated mental-health funding since you-know-who became president. And more important than that, they voted against, and are now preparing to vote en bloc to defund or delay, the law that will do more to address mental health and give society at least a chance that future Aaron Alexises will get treatment that could prevent them going on shooting sprees since … well, pretty much since ever.
Alexis bought his weapon in Virginia, a state where anyone this side of Charles Manson can buy virtually any kind of gun he lusts after as long as he’s a resident. Current federal guidelines bar gun sales only to people who have been institutionalized or “adjudicated as a mental defective.” Neither of these narrow criteria applied in Alexis’s case. Not that it would even matter if one had, as The Atlantic noted; the Virginia Tech shooter had been so adjudicated and still was able to purchase his firepower in the commonwealth. (Alexis, being a nonresident, was blocked from purchasing an AR-15).
Alexis was fairly typical of the type of person who stands precious little chance of getting any mental-health treatment in this country. For starters, he was male, young, and black. That’s an unlucky combination of things to be in the United States for millions of people. But hitting that trifecta and being mentally ill on top of it constitutes the holding of a very unfortunate ovarian-lottery ticket. Single mothers, children, and the elderly all qualify for more forms of assistance than men do. Increasingly, there is a place where men like this wind up where they finally might get a little bit of treatment. It’s called jail. Our prisons are full of mentally ill substance abusers who committed crimes.
There are two things society can do about future Aaron Alexises. One, it can do nothing to improve mental-health approaches and let people fester, but even then it can at least take tougher steps to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Two, it can try to be a little more proactive about this whole category of illness, which affects nearly 60 million Americans (yep, one in five). On both counts, there is one party in Washington that’s eager to act, and one that is perfectly happy to let crazy people buy guns and perfectly content that we have more and more mentally ill people walking around with no treatment. Any guesses?
You may think I have phrased the above unfairly, but this is what the GOP position amounts to. On tougher background checks for the mentally ill, there were provisions in the Manchin-Toomey background-check bill, the one that nearly every Senate Republican voted against. This week New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte is talking up new legislation. You perhaps have read that “even the NRA” supports toughening mental-illness regulations. That’s nice in theory, but in fact, the Senate is not going to do anything on guns and mental illness right, and the reason it’s not going to do anything is that Harry Reid knows he doesn’t have 60 votes to pass anything, especially with huge votes on a possible government shutdown and the debt limit looming. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a physician who isn’t hostile to tighter regulation in this case, acknowledged to The New York Times that “it’s all politics”—which in this case means that no one has the stomach or stones to take another gun-related vote.
They did, however, have the stomach and stones to cast votes over the past few years that have sliced away at funding for mental-health services. Decreased federal grants have forced states to make massive cuts to mental-health services. The National Alliance on Mental Illness referred in 2011 to the “crisis” that has resulted from states’ slashing of mental-health programs. It’s of course mainly Republicans in Congress who pushed for those block-grant cuts. The sequester made things worse. While the sequester doesn’t affect Medicaid, which funds most mental-health services, the non-Medicaid mental-health services have taken a serious hit, including 103,000 fewer treatment admissions in 2013.
And the Republicans will have the stomach and stones to vote very soon here to defund the Affordable Care Act, which, says University of Chicago health-care expert Harold Pollack, “is the most important change to mental-health and substance-abuse policy in decades,” for two reasons. First, the expansion of Medicaid to all citizens with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line will mean that millions of people will be able to afford mental-health care who simply couldn’t before. And second, the ACA requires that coverage of mental illness and substance abuse be offered by insurers “at parity” to more traditional medical treatments. Up to now, these treatments have been more expensive, less likely to be covered, and so on.
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee actually supported those particular provisions of the ACA on unanimous voice vote. So by that measure Republicans are “reasonable” on this issue. But final votes on legislation is where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where Republicans have voted and voted and voted—and will clearly continue to vote—to make sure that we have more potential mass murderers walking among us, listening to those voices until they can’t take it anymore and go out and slaughter innocents. It’s a party of nihilism that has no desire to solve any social problem, holding the rest of us hostage to its craziness as the bodies mount.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 20, 2013
“Too Complacent About American Bloodbaths”: Reasonable Laws Could Solve Shooting Rampages
Last week’s horror at the Washington Navy Yard barely interrupted the stale political chatter, the dueling poll-tested messages, the sensational reports on the latest celebrity divorce or stint in rehab. While the newest mass shooting did preoccupy reporters for a couple of days, its import — at least judged in headlines and cable hours — quickly faded.
It was just another day of horrifying gun violence in America. The public has grown inured to the death toll, complacent about the destruction. If 20 dead babies at Sandy Hook didn’t move us to act, well, what will? When will the United States recover from this insanity — this sense that we cannot or should not rein in guns?
The “rampage” shooting has become a feature of contemporary culture, a peculiarly American perversion. It occurs in a few other countries, but not with the frequency with which it strikes here. This sort of crime — this kind of atrocity — generally stars an angry and deranged man determined to take out his wrath on strangers before going out in a blaze of glory. And there has been a troubling uptick in bloodbaths like this over the last decade.
The gun lobby would no doubt point out that, overall, gun violence has declined over the last several years. That’s true. As crime of all kinds has decreased, so have murders and assaults with firearms. But the “rampage” mass shooting has become more deadly even as more routine gun violence, the sort associated with monetary gain or personal revenge, has decreased.
Earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service issued a report, “Public Mass Shootings in the United States,” that catalogued 78 mass shootings between 1983 and 2012. They accounted for 547 deaths and an additional 476 injuries. The Washington Post has pointed out that half of the deadliest of those — Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Binghamton, Fort Hood and the Navy Yard — have occurred since 2007.
Experts have begun to focus, appropriately, on missed signals about the mental state of accused shooter Aaron Alexis, who told Rhode Island police officers that he was hearing voices. Certainly, the United States needs to do much better in providing mental health care to every citizen who needs it.
But it would be much more practical to focus on reining in guns. As any therapist would tell you, it’s very difficult to predict which patients may turn to violence. Alexis reportedly saw doctors at the Veterans Administration, but he told them he didn’t present a danger to anyone.
Sensible firearms measures would fill in the gap that our mental health system can’t straddle. Such limits would curb the bloodshed without infringing on the rights of any citizen who wants to hunt wild game or defend his home. Shouldn’t it be at least as difficult to get a firearm as it is for me to get a prescription for a sinus infection?
Take the simple matter of a waiting period. Alexis apparently purchased his pump-action shotgun two days before the massacre. With a few more days, various law enforcement and military entities may have pieced together his arrests for firearms violations and a report of his auditory hallucinations, which was apparently forwarded to naval authorities.
Other sensible measures — including a ban on high-capacity magazines — might not have deterred Alexis, but they would have curbed the violence from other shootings. And they would not infringe on the rights of the average gun owner. The Second Amendment does not espouse unlimited freedom to own the most dangerous firearms on the market.
Is the mass shooter the biggest crime problem remaining in America? By no means. But gun deaths are still a huge public health concern.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. will see more deaths from firearms than from car accidents by 2015.
Since the 1960s, we’ve made a series of law and policy changes that have reduced the carnage on our highways. We’ve done the opposite with firearms as various states have approved laws allowing guns in bars, parks and even churches.
That’s a recipe for more bloody rampages.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, September 21, 2013
“How Many More Times?”: Probably Many, Many More In The Imaginary America Of Gun Nuts
As our understanding (if that word doesn’t overstate what we can ever comprehend of such events) of yesterday’s shootings at the Washington Navy Yard improves, we’re seeing a depressingly familiar picture: disturbed man with “anger issues” and “gun issues” gets hold of an assault rifle and kills a lot of innocent people.
At this point, it seems Aaron Alexis came onto the military facility with a shotgun and acquired the assault rifle by stealing it, perhaps after killing its licensed user. If we even begin to have a public discussion of the killings as another data point in favor of stronger gun regulation, the gun lobby will make that a big argument, along with D.C.’s almost uniquely strong gun laws and the availability of other culprits in the affair (e.g., lax security for, and excessive dependence on, defense contractors).
Since we’re talking about a military base, the gun lobby will not, at least, be able to use its favorite argument, that a more secure environment in which more people were heavily armed could have prevented the killings.
But before we even head down the trail of talking about gun laws, let’s just acknowledge that this isn’t a matter of convincing Americans we need tighter background checks for gun purchases. According to every imaginable poll, they’re already convinced. It just doesn’t translate into action, in part because the gun lobby and the Second Amendment absolutists have an iron grip on one our two major political parties, and in part because because their power is especially strong in rural areas where strategically situated Democratic representatives haven’t yet been hunted to extinction.
As WaPo editorialized yesterday:
Life does go on, through Columbine in 1999, through Virginia Tech in 2007, through Sandy Hook in 2012. Each atrocity provides a jolt to the nation and then recedes with little effect, until the next unimaginable event occurs, except each time a little more imaginable. Everything was supposed to change after a man with a semiautomatic weapon mowed down 20 elementary school children in their classrooms last December. But for the politicians, nothing changed. Now, another massacre, another roster of funerals. Again, again, again.
So long as a powerful minority of Americans think the individual right to bear arms–any arms–trumps every consideration of public policy, and is the Crown Jewel of the Bill of Rights, and is our bulwark against tyranny–it won’t much matter. Hundreds dead, thousands dead, tens of thousands dead–it’s all irrelevant to what is in effect a religious commitment to the almighty Second Amendment, a golden calf worshipped as the ultimate expression of an illusory personal independence and an imaginary America.
No, rational arguments and conventional politics may never prevail against people who will look you right in the eye and tell you they need to be heavily armed in case it becomes necessary in their view to overthrow the government and impose their will on you. The whole idea here is that their rights trump your arguments, your priorities, your votes, your democratic elections, your duly authorized representatives or law officers. That’s their understanding of a “constitutional” system, and of what makes America “exceptional.” Their guns are an ever-present reminder to the rest of us that we just don’t know what level of taxation or regulation, or which offense to “traditional” culture, will be the trigger for a “patriotic” resurrection. That, perhaps, will keep us in line.
So while it’s important to keep up the fight for sensible firearms laws, no one should be under the illusion that this or the next mass killing is going to make a difference.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 17, 2013
“Guns Aren’t Different After All”: The National Gun Registry The NRA Warned You Against
A few months ago, conservative senators felt the need to kill a popular, bipartisan proposal on firearm background checks, and relied primarily on a single talking point: the proposal might lead to a firearm database. The very idea of some kind of national gun registry was so offensive to the right that the legislation had to die at the hands of a Republican filibuster.
It didn’t matter that the bipartisan bill had no such database. It didn’t matter that the bipartisan bill explicitly made the creation of such a registry a felony. All that mattered was that conservatives had a lie they liked, and which they used to great effect.
Four months later, Steve Friess reports that a massive, secret database of gun owners exists after all. But it wasn’t built by the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security; it was compiled without gun owners’ consent by the National Rifle Association.
It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.
That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines and more, BuzzFeed has learned.
The result: a Big Data powerhouse that deploys the same high-tech tactics all year round that the vaunted Obama campaign used to win two presidential elections.
The compilation of these kinds of lists is not uncommon. Entities ranging from political parties to media companies to marketing experts want to target — and sometimes micro-target — American voters/consumers and find great value in private, detailed databases.
But we’ve been told that guns are different, and that a sophisticated registry of gun owners represents some kind of threat to American norms and freedoms.
Indeed, we were told that by the NRA, which has created a sophisticated registry of gun owners.
The BuzzFeed piece added:
The NRA won’t say how many names and what other personal information is in its database, but former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman estimates they keep tabs on “tens of millions of people.” […]
Some data-collection efforts are commonplace in politics these days, such as buying information from data brokers on magazine subscriptions and the like.
But several observers said the NRA’s methods reflect a sophistication and ingenuity that is largely unrivaled outside of major national presidential campaigns. While the organization took great umbrage in December when a newspaper published the names and addresses of gun owners in two New York counties, the group for years has been gathering similar information via the same public records as a matter of course.
Former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman added, “It’s probably partially true that people don’t know the information is being collected, but even if they don’t know it, they probably won’t care because the NRA is not part of the government.”
And I suppose that’s the real trump card here. The right doesn’t want the FBI to know which Americans have firearms, but if the NRA secretly compiles such a registry, no problem.
As for why the NRA needs such a database, I imagine it’s simply a matter of marketing — if the far-right organization feels the need to get its political message to a specific audience, it needs to know where to find that audience.
So if you’re a gun owner who was somewhat surprised by targeting mailings that ended up in your inbox or robocalls that ended up on your answering machine, stop being surprised — the NRA knows more than you might expect.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 21, 2013
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