“Two Different America’s”: Fighting Firearms With Firearms
On Saturday, just a few days after President Obama put forth 23 executive actions to curb gun violence, approximately 1,000 gun-rights activists gathered at the Texas state Capitol to show their opposition. The protest was one of 49 organized around the country by pro-gun group Guns Across America, but the one in Texas was among the biggest. Signs pronounced assault weapons “the modern musket” and quoted the Second Amendment. Speakers including Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and state Representative Steve Toth argued that gun control had no place in America. “The Second Amendment was an enumeration of a right that I already had received from God,” speaker Ralph Patterson, the McLennan County Republican Party chair, told the crowd. “God gave me the right to defend myself.”
Three days after the rally, on Tuesday, Texas was in the national headlines when a shooting occurred at a Houston community college. After the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado, and Oak Creek, Wisconsin, some feared the worst. Instead, it turned out the case was a dispute between two men, at least one of whom was armed. Three people were wounded; fortunately, none died.
To gun-control advocates, the incident in Houston was yet another reason why federal and state governments need to tamp down on gun availability. But in Texas, lawmakers were arguing just the opposite. For many of them, there’s only one answer to gun violence: more guns. That night, after the shooting, state Senator Dan Patrick, a powerful figure on the state’s far right, went on Anderson Cooper 360 and pushed for a proposed bill to let those 21 and older get concealed handgun licenses to carry guns on campuses. “I don’t think a lot of people in the mainstream media and maybe back east understand Texas,” he said. According to Patrick, the shooting “only re-emphasizes the issue that people must have a right to defend themselves.”
Nationally, the mass shootings in 2012, ending with the particularly horrifying death toll at Sandy Hook Elementary School, sparked a renewed push for gun control. The president’s proposals include beefing up requirements for buying guns, reinstating a federal assault weapons ban, and banning certain types of ammunition. Meanwhile, lawmakers in a number of states are proposing their own measures; New York has already passed a law expanding a ban on assault weapons and reducing the allowable size of gun magazines to seven rounds.
In the other America, however, the mass shootings have only exacerbated an ongoing effort to make guns more prevalent and accessible—particularly in schools. Texas lawmakers have been among the most visible, staking out a position far to the right of the national conversation. For the third session in a row, pro-gun lawmakers like Patrick will push a measure to allow concealed handguns on college campuses, a measure Texas Governor Rick Perry has also supported. Another proposal would designate school employees with special training to be armed; it’s modeled on the federal air-marshal program, in which a plain-clothed air marshal may be riding a plane armed. The lieutenant governor is pushing for the state to fund gun-training sessions for teachers and school employees. There’s also a bill that bars state officials from enforcing federal gun-control laws. The law may not carry much practical weight—federal laws trump state ones—but it gets the point across.
Texas has a legendary affinity for guns. But it’s hardly unique. Eight states already allow concealed handguns on college campuses and, like Texas, Indiana and Arkansas are considering similar legislation this year. Arkansas and North Dakota have proposals to allow people to carry concealed handguns into churches. Seven states—Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and even Arizona, the same state where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with 18 others two years ago—have proposals similar to Texas’s to ban enforcement of federal gun laws. Arizona is also one of six states where lawmakers have proposed measures to exempt guns produced in-state from federal restrictions.
In most of these gun-crazy states, there’s little to no discussion of measures that would regulate gun ownership or restrict the types of guns and ammunition available. That, the logic goes, would only leave the “good guys” defenseless and vulnerable since criminals will access weapons regardless of the law. Instead, the answer to gun violence is almost always more guns. That way, individuals can take charge of the situation, protect themselves and maybe even take down the shooter. People are considered less likely to attack someone if that someone might be carrying a concealed weapon. Among those further on the fringe, the “protection” rhetoric gets even more intense: Without unfettered access to guns, they say (or yell), people cannot protect themselves from evil forces, including the government.
If you want to see evidence of polarization in the country, just look at gun laws. In one America, mass shootings lead to new restrictions; in the other America, the same shootings lead to fewer restrictions. After years of gun policy drifting further to the right, any move to move the law back toward the center (or further left) is immediately branded as extreme, if not unthinkable.
Ronald Reagan championed the assault-weapons ban that Obama is proposing to reinstate and expand. But these days, the pro-gun lobby is far more absolutist. For those who believe gun violence will decrease as the number of guns decreases, the situation is bleak unless there’s a federal action. So long as states like Texas and Arizona continue to make automatic weapons and military-grade ammunition available, those firearms being manufactured can easily find their way to states like New York, in spite of their stricter gun laws.
The striking number of mass shootings in 2012—coupled with concerns about the general level of gun violence in the country—has left many open to more gun restrictions. But while the number of true NRA believers may have dwindled (it’s hard to say for sure), those that remain are just as hardcore as ever. In Illinois and Wisconsin, where legislators were considering some limits to gun ownership, the NRA flexed its muscle, as members flooded the state capitols with calls and emails opposing the measures. In both cases, the lawmakers backed off.
On Tuesday—the same day of the shooting in Houston—three Texas lawmakers announced a different kind of proposal to make schools safer. The Texas School District Safety Act would create special taxing districts to pay for additional security, including guards and metal detectors. This might pass for middle ground; it allows school districts to make the decisions and would at least offer money to pay for armed professionals, rather than the cheaper option of arming teachers. But don’t think for a minute that metal detectors will automatically keep out guns.
After all, when the Texas Capitol building put metal detectors at entryways in 2011, there was one caveat: Those with a concealed handgun permits could skip the security line and the search and enter armed. In this America, guns are the only guarantee of safefy; it’s only the lack of guns that make people unsafe. It will take a lot more than Newtown, or many more Newtowns, to change that mentality.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, January 25, 2013
“A Line In The Sand”: The NRA Won’t Support Arizona’s New Gun Bill
Arizona is a place where you can get a family photograph with Santa holding an AK-47, where state lawmakers point pink pistols at reporters, and where men tote AR-15s to political protests. And if one state representative gets his way, gun-loving Arizonans won’t have to worry about pesky federal gun control laws, because it will be illegal to enforce them.
Republican state Rep. Steve Smith proposed a bill last week that would prohibit public officials in the state from following any federal gun laws or regulations, fearing an effort by the Obama administration to impose harsh new restrictions on firearms. That means no background checks, no restrictions on automatic weapons or grenade launchers, and no prohibition on sale to the mentally ill, unless the state enacts its own restrictions, none of which are laid out in Smith’s bill.
While there is no penalty specified for state and local officials who follow federal law, federal judges or law enforcement agents would face felony charges punishable by up to a year in state prison. “Here’s a line in the sand: Thanks, but no thanks. Stay out with your federal regulations you’re going to impose on us,” Smith said.
HB 2291 would almost certainly be unconstitutional, as federal law trumps state law, and Smith acknowledged that there would probably be legal challenges that would have to be worked out in the courts. But he appears to be trying to get around this problem by making his legislation apply only to firearms that are manufactured in and never leave the state of Arizona, presumably in an attempt to thwart the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate trade. Still, the Supreme Court has not been sympathetic to similar arguments.
And the Constitution isn’t Smith’s only problem; he’s catching some friendly fire too. Todd Rathner, an Arizona resident who sits on the board of the National Rifle Association, told the Capitol News Service that he doesn’t like the bill because of what it would do to gun dealers, who must receive federal licenses and comply with federal regulations.
“I worry about putting federal firearms licensees in the middle of a fight between us and the federal government,” he said. “It puts them between a rock and a hard place because they worry about committing a federal crime or a state crime.”
Indeed, Smith’s law specifies that firearms dealers would be barred from following the regulations mandated by the federal government to maintain their license. Still, Rathner said of Smith’s proposal, “I like the message he’s trying to send.”
Arizona isn’t the only state considering what amounts to a lite form of secession over guns. In Mississippi, Gov. Phil Bryant and state House Speaker Philip Gunn have both said they intend to block any new Obama executive orders on gun control. South Carolina lawmakers have made similar moves as well. But Arizona’s law goes much further, by not only restricting new regulations but also all existing ones, targeting “any act, law, statute, rule or regulation” from Washington on guns.
Also, keep in mind that the NRA’s objection to the legislation is not that it is unconstitutional or that it might make it easier for criminals to acquire weapons, but that it would hurt firearms dealers. If Smith rewrote the law to exempt dealers, one wonders if the NRA would be OK with the rest of it.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, January 23, 2013
“The Greatest Fraud”: How The NRA Hijacked The Republican Party
There are few better ways of grasping how far the Republicans have abandoned the middle ground, where they used to win elections, than the way their leaders have become agents of the gun industry. Conservatives used to consider themselves law-abiding citizens who put great store by the permanence of institutions, by the rule of law, and by the traditional caution and common sense of the sensible majority. Such devotion to stability, continuation, and moderation explains why so many conservatives were alarmed when the social revolution of the Sixties erupted. Suddenly, it seemed, everything was on the move. Children no longer believed in the wisdom of their elders, nor obeyed the unwritten rules that had guided every previous generation. The days of everyone knowing their place and remaining in it were overthrown and it appeared that anarchy had broken out in America.
Nowhere was this more evident to traditional conservatives than in the way African-Americans responded to the civil rights legislation enacted by Lyndon Johnson. Instead of being grateful for the overdue democratic changes wrested from reluctant Southern lawmakers, a significant number of African-Americans demanded more profound change. There were riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other major cities which were met by calls from conservatives for tighter gun controls. The Black Panthers, dressed as soldiers and carrying guns, as was their right under the Second Amendment, demanded that African-Americans be allowed to live in a separate self-governing state. In May 1967, 30 Panthers took loaded rifles, shotguns, and pistols into the California State Capitol to protest against new gun control laws. The California governor, Ronald Reagan, declared: “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
After John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Johnson joined with conservatives to pass the federal Gun Control Act that stipulated a minimum age for gun buyers, restricted traffic across state lines to federally registered gun dealers, limited the sale of certain destructive bullets, required guns to carry serial numbers, and added drug addicts and the insane to those, like felons, who were already forbidden to own guns. When it transpired that Lee Harvey Oswald had bought the rifle that killed the president mail order from the pages of the National Rifle Association magazine, the NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth backed an end to mail-order sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States,” he said.
In the mid-Seventies, the NRA switched from being a moderate organization backing moderate gun controls into a radical body that promulgated an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment with a new motto: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It was this originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment that led Warren Burger, the conservative, constructionist chief justice appointed by Richard Nixon to declare on PBS in 1991 that the NRA had perpetrated “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. … [the NRA has] misled the American people and they, I regret to say, they have had far too much influence on the Congress of the United States than as a citizen I would like to see. And I am a gun man.”
Today the Republican Party remains in hock to the NRA leadership and through them to their paymasters in the gun-making industry. The NRA runs an official list, like the old Communist Party, of preferred candidates and grades them according to their adherence to the strict constructionist interpretation of the Second Amendment. If a candidate fails to offer total support for absolutist gun rights, the NRA funds a campaign in the next party primary to unseat them. Polls suggest, however, that the NRA leadership no longer represents the wishes of its members towards moderate gun controls, and since the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren, the extremism of NRA leaders like Wayne LaPierre, whose tin-eared response to the shootings so jarred voters in all parties, suggests the existence at the top of the organization of a self-serving, superannuated elite that no longer commands the confidence of its rank and file.
Gun rights activism is just one strand of Republican extremism out of kilter with moderate Republicans and middle ground independent voters who decide elections. In the mid-Seventies, while Second Amendment fundamentalists were starting to blacklist GOP candidates who would not support their hard line, the party was also transformed by the rise of radical Christian fundamentalists, whose literal reading of scripture led them to adopt social conservative positions on abortion, race, and homosexuality. These changes coincided with the arrival of neo-conservatism, a body of theory that saw America as not just the world’s policeman but the harbinger of democracy everywhere with a particular brief to counter radical Islam. Until then it could be argued, citing two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, that the Democrats were the war party and the Republicans the party that put America first. Since the neo-cons that notion has been turned on its head by the persecution of two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were to be abandoned after an inconclusive outcome.
Around the same time, economic notions that had ensured unprecedented prosperity under Eisenhower and Nixon gave way in the GOP to fiscal conservatism – absolutist ideas about the money supply and reducing public spending that George H. W. Bush derided as “voodoo economics.” Since 2009, libertarian insurgents that in the GOP primaries last year accounted for about 10 per cent of party activists have extrapolated careful budgeting into demands for minimal government. Since Tea Party protestors entered the GOP in numbers in 2009, they have instituted further restrictive demands upon Republican candidates, diminishing the discretion of elected officials by directing them to obey pledges not to raise taxes.
Once a moderate party protecting old fashioned values, since the mid-Seventies the Republicans have adopted extreme positions that are alien to the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush Sr. A party proud of its pragmatism is being driven by dogmatic theories imported by unbending ideologues such as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. On guns, abortion, immigration, women’s health, homosexual rights, home schooling, and a host of other issues, the once inclusive Republican Party has lost its one-nation tradition and supplanted it with a hotchpotch of sectarian interests policed by a coalition of narrow, theory-driven mavericks, curmudgeons, libertarians, radicals, and eccentrics.
The GOP is deeply divided, a split that conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer attribute to fast footwork by President Obama. Other conservatives, such as Bill O’Reilly, think the party will find it hard to put itself back together by the time of the next presidential election, never mind the mid-terms in two years. Citing the way Obama and Bill Clinton arrived from nowhere to save the Democrats from an unpopular ideological stance, Krauthammer believes the Republicans will be saved by an as-yet unknown savior. Four years is, indeed, a long time in politics, but it may take far longer than that to purge the party of its popular perception as a redoubt for gun-toting, women-loathing, gay-hating, xenophobic, war-mongering anarchists.
By: Nicholas Wapshot, Reuters, January 18, 2013
“Shameless, Repulsive And Dangerous”: Leave The President’s Kids Out Of It
Abusing a president is fair game. It is practically an American pastime.
Abusing his spouse is usually tasteless, but spouses have become political surrogates, and they have to expect a little rough-and-tumble now and again.
But abusing a president’s children? Practically daring the harmful, the hateful and the hideous in our society to make them targets? How shameless do you have to be to do that?
Ask the National Rifle Association.
That organization has been running a Web video verbally targeting the president’s two daughters. I do not suggest the NRA actually desires them to come to harm. I am (reasonably) sure nobody in the upper reaches of the NRA is that morally depraved.
But the NRA is using its members’ dues not to protect the rights of hunters, which is what the group used to do, but to run a video twisting the Secret Service protection of the president’s children to aid those who make a fortune by manufacturing and selling guns.
The ad says that armed guards protect the president’s children but that because the president thinks armed guards in every school might not be a sensible idea, he is an “elitist hypocrite.”
In point of fact, the president has never said he absolutely opposes armed guards in every school.
What he said on “Meet the Press” recently was: “I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools.”
He is skeptical. I am skeptical. Columbine High had an armed guard, and 12 students and one teacher were still murdered.
What I am not skeptical about is that the family of our president needs Secret Service protection.
What I am not skeptical about is that raising the question of the safety of the president’s daughters was not just repulsive, but dangerous. Yes, the president’s daughters live in a mansion called the White House, and they have servants and their own bowling alley and get to go around in (armored) limousines.
But come on. They are kids. They are 14 and 11. Do you think they really like the protective bubble they have to live in?
And do you think they are not at special risk requiring special protection?
“To go so far as to make the safety of the president’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.
I would call Carney’s statement downright restrained.
A few hours later, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden announced their own ambitious gun control plans. Some parts of it can be accomplished immediately by the president through executive action (though keep in mind, what one president does, a later president can undo).
And some can be accomplished only by Congress, a body so dysfunctional that it has become an elephants’ graveyard of hope.
But the president made one thing clear: What he wants to do about guns, he wants to do for America’s children.
“This is our first task as a society: keeping our children safe,” he said. “This is how we will be judged.”
He said he believes the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. “I respect our strong tradition of gun ownership and the rights of hunters and sportsmen,” he said. “I also believe most gun owners agree that we can respect the Second Amendment while keeping an irresponsible, law-breaking few from inflicting harm on a massive scale.”
There is nothing in the president’s proposals that would keep a hunter from hunting or a target shooter from shooting. Changing a gun magazine every 10 rounds is not a burdensome task.
Having a background check for people who buy guns at gun shows is not a unique abridgement of personal freedom. Their personal “freedom” is already abridged. And by gun shows, I know this because I have been checking the websites of gun shows, and a lot seem to have the same rule: no loaded guns allowed.
“No loaded firearms and no loaded magazines are permitted in any Crossroads gun show,” one site said. “Your personal safety is our No. 1 priority while you are at the show.”
Personal safety? I thought loaded guns created personal safety.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Wayne LaPierre, the CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, said a week after the massacre at Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut.
So I don’t get it. What if a “bad guy” with a loaded gun, who had become deranged by playing a video game (which is one of the NRA’s greatest fears), barged into a gun show? Wouldn’t we want a whole bunch of “good guys” with loaded guns to stop him?
So why disarm people at gun shows?
Because “personal safety” is the No. 1 priority, that’s why.
And that’s why we have to reduce the easy availability of guns in our society and ban military-style assault weapons and large-capacity gun magazines.
As Obama said Wednesday: “If parents and teachers, police officers and pastors; if hunters and sportsmen; if responsible gun owners; if Americans of every background stand up and say, ‘Enough. We’ve suffered too much pain and care too much about our children to allow this to continue,’ then change will come.”
For some, it will come too late. For some, it has already come too late.
But enough is enough.
By: Roger Simon, Politico, January 16, 2013
“Defying A Bloody Status Quo”: In The Face Of Brutality And Carnage, The “Moderate” Is Fighting Back
President Obama went big in offering a remarkably comprehensive plan to curb gun violence, and good for him. But his announcement Wednesday is only the beginning of a protracted struggle for national sanity on firearms. Extremists have controlled the debate on guns for many years. They will do all they can to preserve a bloody status quo. The irrationality of their approach must be exposed and their power broken.
Far from acting as if his work was now done, the president made clear that he is fully invested in seeing his agenda realized — and fully prepared to lead a national movement to loosen the grip of resignation and cynicism in the face of brutality and carnage. Gun violence is not some “boutique” issue, as it is occasionally called. We are in danger of having mass shootings define us as a nation. As a people, we must rise up against this obscenity.
This fight is especially challenging for many who view themselves as “moderates” or “centrists.” Moderation is a thoroughly honorable disposition, and Obama’s proposals are moderation incarnate. By international standards, they are very cautious. The president did not call for registering all guns or confiscating assault weapons. He strongly endorsed the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. He is operating within a broad consensus about what is possible and what can work.
An assault weapons ban received 38 Republican votes in the House in 1994 and is backed by 58 percent of Americans, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. Were those Republicans outside the mainstream? And what about that 58 percent of Americans? The poll also found that 65 percent favored a ban on high-capacity magazines, another part of the Obama plan, and 88 percent favored closing the gun show loophole, part of the effort to make sure there are background checks for all gun purchases.
But the lobbies that purport to speak for gun owners (while actually representing the interests of gun manufacturers) don’t care what the public thinks. They tried to pretend the president’s ideas are radical. And it shows how perverse our national conversation can become when those who speak in the name of civility, reason and bipartisanship give in to timidity.
Too often, moderation has become a synonym for cowardice. Too often, moderates lack the guts to define the sensible middle of the road themselves — as Obama has done on the gun issue — and then defend it. Instead, they yield to the temptation to calibrate where everyone else stands before deciding what they believe. This allows extremists who lack any shame to drag our discourse off the road entirely, into a ditch of unreason, fear and invective.
After the NRA’s vile new advertisement that uses Secret Service protection for the president’s daughters to make a small-minded political point, can anyone take the organization’s arguments seriously again? Aren’t politicians who continue to bow low before the NRA complicit with a crowd that lacks any sense of decency?
It tells us all we need to know that the gun lobby is deeply afraid of the facts and the evidence. This is why one of the most important actions the president took was to end the ban on research into gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the weapons lobby had forced through a compliant Congress.
Yet Obama and Vice President Joe Biden also worked hard to find middle ground in their anti-violence program in drawing on concerns raised since the Sandy Hook tragedy by gun rights advocates. Obama thus addressed not only firearms issues but also the imperative to improve school security and our mental health system, as well as the need to know more about the impact of violent videogames.
Most heartening of all was the tone the president took. He did not cast himself as an evenhanded umpire far above the fray, handing down ideas that all people of good will would inevitably accept. He acknowledged that the battle ahead would be difficult. He predicted he would have to fight the lie that his plan constituted “a tyrannical assault on liberty.” And he sought to mobilize a new effort to counteract the entrenched power of those who have dictated submissiveness in the face of bloodshed.
“Enough,” Obama declared, insisting that change would come only “if the American people demand it.”
Will we?
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 16, 2013
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