“Everyone But Us”: The NRA Should Add Its Own Members To Its “Enemies List”
Last September, The National Rifle Association released its annual “enemies list” of organizations and individuals who endorse “anti-gun positions.” The bizarre list of 525 names includes mainstream organizations from AARP to the National Association of Police Organizations, and celebrities, national figures and journalists from Maya Angelou to Henry Winkler to E.J. Dionne Jr.
But why aren’t NRA members on the enemies list? After all, 75 percent of NRA members support universal background checks for gun sales, which the NRA opposes.
And why aren’t women on the enemies list? A majority 67 percent of women support a ban on semi-automatic weapons, which the NRA opposes.
And why aren’t gun owners on the enemies list? A majority 60 percent of gun owners favor a federal database to track gun sales, which the NRA opposes.
Lastly, why aren’t the American people on the NRA’s enemies list? The majority of Americans support an assault weapons ban, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and universal background checks… all of which the NRA opposes.
There is one group that the NRA would never add to its enemies list — gun manufacturers. One must always remember on which side one’s bread is buttered.
By: Josh Markds, The National Memo, February 1, 2013
“You Can’t Make This Crap Up”: It’s Official, The NRA President Loses His Ever-Loving Mind
From the you-can’t-make-this-crap-up files, David Keene, the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), is blaming President Obama and “the left” for death threats against him and his family and:
What this reflects are two things. One is the uncivil way in which idealogues on the left in this country go after their enemies. The second thing it shows is the reflection of the left and the President of the United States’ attempt to demonize and blame those who disagree with them for everything that he doesn’t like.
This from the group who released an ad that targeted the president’s daughters.
Oh, and about all that blaming and demonizing? Here’s what Obama said about the NRA when he announced his proposals to curb gun violence:
If you want to buy a gun — whether it’s from a licensed dealer or a private seller — you should at least have to show you are not a felon or somebody legally prohibited from buying one. This is common sense. And an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with us on the need for universal background checks — including more than 70 percent of the National Rifle Association’s members, according to one survey. So there’s no reason we can’t do this.
Yes, how dare the president blame and demonize the NRA by pointing out they’re ignoring the gun owners they claim to represent?
As for the “hundreds” of death threats Keene claims to have received? Well, there are probably police reports somewhere.
By: Barbara Morrill, Daily Kos, January 18, 2013
“Nothing Short Of Horrifying”: Here A Gun, There A Gun, Everywhere A Gun
As Jaime and I noted yesterday, many Democratic politicians feel the need to preface any discussion of guns with an assurance that they, too, own guns and love to shoot, as though that were the price of admission to a debate on the topic. But what you seldom hear is anyone, politician or otherwise, say, “I don’t own a gun and I don’t ever intend to” as a statement of identity, defining a perspective that carries moral weight equal to that of gun owners. So it was good to see Josh Marshall, in a thoughtful post, say, “Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. And I have my own set of rights not to have gun culture run roughshod over me.” Let me tell you my perspective on this, and offer some thoughts on the question of what sort of a society we want to have when it comes to the question of guns. Because there are two radically different visions that are clashing here.
For the record, I, too, am not a gun owner (you’re shocked to learn this, I know). I took riflery at camp as a kid, shooting a .22 at paper targets (and when you achieved each new level of marksmanship, you got a certificate from the NRA!), and I’ve held unloaded guns a few times. I understand the attraction of guns. They give you a feeling of power and potency, and they’re fun to shoot, which is why every little boy loves playing with toy guns. But in the town where I grew up, you never saw a gun that wasn’t in a cop’s holster. If any of my classmates’ parents had them (and I’m sure some did), they never mentioned it, and my own parents would sooner have adopted a pack of hyenas than brought a gun into our home. As far as that community was concerned, the relative absence of guns was one of the things that made it a nice place to live. It wasn’t because everyone got together and took a vote on it, but that absence was nevertheless an expression of the community’s collective will.
I’m sure that many gun advocates would hear that and say, “Don’t you realize how vulnerable you all were? You should have been armed!” But the truth is we weren’t vulnerable (crime was low; I have a vague memory of one murder that happened during my entire childhood but I could be imagining it), and although as kids we always complained that the town was boring, everyone seemed pretty happy with the security situation. And if one day, a few of the town’s citizens started letting everyone know that they were now carrying firearms when they were down at the drugstore or the bank, it wouldn’t have made anyone feel safer. Just the opposite, in fact. It would have changed everything for the worse.
What I’m getting at is that one of the things that makes a society work is that people have rights that are protected in the law, but they also exercise those rights with consideration for the society’s other members. For instance, we have a strong commitment to freedom of expression, such that many things that would be deemed obscene and get you tossed in jail in other countries are tolerated here. So if I want do a performance art piece that involves lots of cursing and tossing about bodily fluids, I can do it. But I’m not going to do it on the sidewalk in front of your house during dinner time, not because I don’t have the right, but because that would make me an asshole. In the exercising of my rights, I’d be changing the conditions of your existence, even for a brief time, in a way that you’d find unpleasant. So because I value having a society where we all live together, I’ll choose to find a theater to put on my performance, and you can choose to come see it or not. In the same way, if you choose to have a gun in your home because you think it protects you, that’s your right. I’m going to choose not to let my kid come play with your kid at your house, and we can all get along.
According to the Constitution, you have a right to own a gun. I’ll be honest and say that I wish it weren’t so; the fantasies the most extreme gun advocates notwithstanding, our liberty is protected by our laws and institutions, not by our ability to wage war on our government. Canadians and Britons and French people aren’t any less free than we are because they are less able to start killing cops and soldiers when they decide the time for insurrection has come. Nevertheless, that basic right exists and it isn’t going to be taken away. But the rest of us should also be able to say that there are limits to how far your exercising that right should be allowed to change the rest of our lives, and if necessary the law should enforce those limits.
As I’ve written before, the goal of many gun advocates, particularly those who promote concealed carry, is that we make it so as many people as possible take as many guns as possible into as many places as possible. That’s been the focus of their legislative efforts in recent years, not only passing concealed carry laws nearly everywhere, but also passing laws to make you able to take guns into bars, schools, government buildings, houses of worship, and so on, and also advocating for laws that would let you take your guns to communities where it would be otherwise illegal to carry them. Which would mean that your right to carry your gun trumps the right of everyone else to say, this is a place where we’ve decided we don’t want people bringing guns.
Is it possible that on my next visit to the local coffee place, a madman might come and shoot the place up? Yes, it’s possible. And is it possible that if half the patrons were armed, one of them might be able to take him down and limit the number of people he killed? Yes, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll win the next Powerball. But if holding out that infinitesimal possibility means that every time I go down for a coffee, I’m entering a place full of guns, it’s not a price I’m willing to pay. That’s the decision I’ve made, and it’s the decision that the other people in my community have made as well.
But gun advocates want to create a society governed by fear, or at the very least, make sure that everyone feels the same fear they feel. “An armed society is a polite society,” they like to say, and it’s polite because we’re all terrified of each other. They genuinely believe that that the price of safety is that there should be no place where guns, and the fear and violence they embody, are not present. Not your home, not your kids’ school, not your supermarket, not your church, no place. But for many of us—probably for most of us—that vision of society is nothing short of horrifying.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 18, 2013
“Degrees Of Principle”: In A Sane World, Gun Control Proposals Are Hardly Draconian
Unlike many who recently have joined the debate about gun rights, I have a long history with guns, which I proffer only in the interest of preempting the “elitist, liberal, swine, prostitute, blahblahblah” charge.
I grew up in a home with guns, lots of them, and was taught early how to shoot, care for firearms and treat them respectfully. My father’s rules were simple: Never point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them; if you intend to shoot, aim to kill.
Dear ol’ Dad was a law-and-order guy — a lawyer, judge and World War II veteran who did everything by the book — except when it came to guns. Most memorable among his many lectures was a confidence: “There is only one law in the land that I would break,” he told me. “I will never register my guns.”
I suppose if he hadn’t also opposed bumper stickers, he might have attached the one about “cold dead fingers” to his fender. He also might have liked a slogan I read recently: “With guns, we are citizens; without them, we are subjects.”
By today’s standards my father would be considered a gun nut, but his sentiments were understandable in the context of his time. Like others of his generation, he had witnessed Germany’s disarming of its citizenry and the consequences thereafter. Thus, the slippery slope of which gun-rights advocates speak is not without precedent or reason.
But the history of gun-control laws is not without contradictions and ironies that belie the current insistence that guns-without-controls is the ipso facto of originalist America. In fact, the federal government of our Founders made gun ownership mandatory for white males, while denying others — slaves and later freedmen — the privilege.
Today, the most vociferous defenders of gun rights tend to be white, rural males who oppose any regulation. But theirs was once the ardently held position of radical African Americans. Notably, in the 1960s, Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey Newton toted guns wherever they went to make a point: Blacks needed guns to protect themselves in a country that wasn’t quite ready to enforce civil rights.
In one remarkable incident in May 1967, as recounted in The Atlantic by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, 24 men and six women, all armed, ascended the California capitol steps, read a proclamation about gun rights and proceeded inside — with their guns, which was legal at the time.
Needless to say, conservatives, including then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, were suddenly very, very interested in gun control. That afternoon, Reagan told reporters there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
The degree of one’s allegiance to principle apparently depends mainly on who is holding the gun.
While black activists were adamant about their right to protect themselves, the National Rifle Association wasn’t much interested in the constitutional question until the mid-’70s, when an organizational split produced a new leader, Harlon Carter, who was dedicated to advocacy and determined to dig a deep line in the Beltway sand.
The Second Amendment debate about what the Founders intended was clarified in 2008 when theSupreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller determined that the right of the people to keep and bear arms included individuals, not just a “well-regulated militia.” However, as Winkler pointed out, Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion left wiggle room for exceptions, including prohibitions related to felons and the mentally ill. Scalia was not casting doubt, the justice wrote, on “laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
This still leaves open the loophole of private sales that do not require background checks, which President Obama wants to close. We will hear more about this in coming weeks, but the call meanwhile to ban assault weapons or limit magazines in the wake of the horrific mass murder of children and others at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut is hardly draconian. It won’t solve the problem of mentally disturbed people exacting weird justice from innocents, but it might limit the toll. Having to stop one’s rampage to reload rather breaks the spell, or so one would imagine.
One also imagines that the old Reagan would say there’s no reason a citizen needs an assault weapon or a magazine that can destroy dozens of people in minutes. He would certainly be correct and, in a sane world, possibly even electable.
By: Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 11, 2013
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