“The Weaponization Of Our Culture”: Ten Arguments Gun Advocates Make And Why They’re Wrong
There has been yet another mass shooting, something that now seems to occur on a monthly basis. Every time another tragedy like this occurs, gun advocates make the same arguments about why we can’t possibly do anything to restrict the weaponization of our culture. Here’s a guide to what they’ll be saying in the coming days:
1. Now isn’t the time to talk about guns.
We’re going to hear this over and over, and not just from gun advocates; Jay Carney said it to White House reporters today. But if we’re not going to talk about it now, when are we going to talk about it? After Sandy hit the East Coast, no one said, “Now isn’t the time to talk about disaster preparedness; best leave that until it doesn’t seem so urgent.” When there’s a terrorist attack, no one says, “Now isn’t the time to talk about terrorism.” Nowl is exactly the time.
2. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Maybe, but people with guns kill many, many more people than they would if they didn’t have guns, and guns designed to kill as many people as possible. We don’t know if the murderer in Newtown was suffering from a suicidal depression, but many mass shooters in the past were. And guess what? People suffer from suicidal depression everywhere in the world. People get angry and upset everywhere in the world. But there aren’t mass shootings every few weeks in England or Costa Rica or Japan, and the reason is that people in those places who have these impulses don’t have an easy way to access lethal weapons and unlimited ammunition. But if you want to kill large numbers of people and you happen to be an American, you’ll find it easy to do.
3. If only everybody around was armed, an ordinary civilian could take out a mass killer before he got too far.
If that were true, then how come it never happens? The truth is that in a chaotic situation, even highly trained police officers often kill bystanders. The idea that some accountant who spent a few hours at the range would suddenly turn into Jason Bourne and take out the killer without doing more harm than good has no basis in reality.
4. We don’t need more laws, we just need to enforce the laws we have.
The people who say this are the same ones who fight to make sure that existing laws are as weak and ineffectual as possible. Our current gun laws are riddled with loopholes and allow people to amass enormous arsenals of military-style weapons with virtually no restrictions.
5. Criminals will always find a way to get guns no matter what measures we take, so what’s the point?
The question isn’t whether we could snap our fingers and make every gun disappear. It’s whether we can make it harder for criminals to get guns, and harder for an unbalanced person with murderous intent to kill so many people. The goal is to reduce violence as much as possible. There’s no other problem for which we’d say if we can’t solve it completely and forever we shouldn’t even try.
6. The Constitution says I have a right to own guns.
Yes it does, but for some reason gun advocates think that the right to bear arms is the only constitutional right that is virtually without limit. You have the right to practice your religion, but not if your religion involves human sacrifice. You have the right to free speech, but you can still be prosecuted for incitement or conspiracy, and you can be sued for libel. Every right is subject to limitation when it begins to threaten others, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that even though there is an individual right to gun ownership, the government can put reasonable restrictions on that right.
And we all know that if this shooter turns out to have a Muslim name, plenty of Americans, including plenty of gun owners, will be more than happy to give up all kinds of rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Have the government read my email? Have my cell phone company turn over my call records? Check which books I’m taking out of the library? Make me take my shoes off before getting on a plane, just because some idiot tried to blow up his sneakers? Sure, do what you’ve got to do. But don’t make it harder to buy thousands of rounds of ammunition, because if we couldn’t do that we’d no longer be free.
7. Widespread gun ownership is a guarantee against tyranny.
If that had anything to do with contemporary life, then mature democracies would be constantly overthrown by despots. But they aren’t. We shouldn’t write laws based on the fantasies of conspiracy theorists.
8. Guns are a part of American culture.
Indeed they are, but so are a lot of things, and that tells us nothing about whether they’re good or bad and how we want to treat them going forward. Slavery was a part of American culture for a couple of hundred years, but eventually we decided it had to go.
9. The American people don’t want more gun control.
The truth is that when public opinion polls have asked Americans about specific measures, the public is in favor of a much more restrictive gun regime than we have now. Significant majorities would like to see the assault weapons ban reinstated, mandatory licensing and training for all gun owners, significant waiting periods for purchases, and host of other restrictions (there are more details here). In many cases, gun owners themselves support more restrictions than we currently have.
10. Having movie theaters and schools full of kids periodically shot up is just a price we should be willing to pay if it means I get to play with guns and pretend I’m Wyatt Earp.
OK, that’s actually an argument gun advocates don’t make. But it’s the truth that lies beneath all their other arguments. All that we suffer because of the proliferation of guns—these horrifying tragedies, the 30,000 Americans who are killed every year with guns—for gun advocates, it’s unfortunate, but it’s a price they’re willing to pay. If only they’d have the guts to say it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 13, 2012
“Life Is Not A James Bond Movie”: Bob Costas Was Right To Denounce Gun Violence
There is a manufactured debate over whether Bob Costas should lose his job for questioning the “gun culture” Costas suggested was responsible for the deaths of an NFL player and his girlfriend. That’s not a real issue; Costas isn’t a news anchor. He’s a sportscaster and commentator, and weighs in all the time on the athletic performances of players and teams. Failing to talk about the role of a firearm in the tragedy would have been a glaring omission.
Had Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher been responsible for only one death—that of Kasandra Perkins, his girlfriend and mother of their now-orphaned three-month-old daughter—the conversation might now be about domestic violence. It might be about whether aggressive sports competitions foster aggressive action in other arenas. It might have brought more attention to the problem of violence against women in general.
But Belcher turned a horrible crime into an even more horrible tragedy. He went to the Chief’s practice facility, admitted the murder, thanked his coach and general manager, and then—with the coach and GM watching—shot himself in the head.
It is impossible not to have a conversation about guns, given the circumstances. Belcher might have been able to harm, even kill, Perkins without a gun. He would not have committed suicide in front of two people if he had not had a firearm.
Many people like to believe that if we all had guns, such tragedies would not occur. The theory is that if someone breaks out a weapon—at a Virginia campus, a Colorado movie theater, or a home—the would-be victim could fight back, evenly armed. It’s easy to acquire that delusion when one watches action movies. Many of us would like to believe we would respond that quickly and calculatingly in the event of an armed assault. In real life, things do not happen that way.
In 1999, I was covering the civil conflict in Kosovo, where danger came from several camps—the Kosovo Liberation Army, the police, the paramilitary, the Serb soldiers, and the most dangerous of all—drunk civilians with guns. One day, two radio reporters, a translator, and I were headed back to the provincial capital of Pristina. We saw, up a hill to our left, that a village was being burned down. Foolishly, we drove toward it to see what was happening. Halfway up the hill, I heard a loud and quick series of click-clicks, as Serb paramilitary surrounded our car and pointed machine guns at us.
It took about 20 seconds even to realize what was happening—and this was not in a movie theater or campus; this was in a war zone where such developments are not completely unexpected. My friends put up their hands. I, incomprehensively, lowered my head, protecting it with my hands (did I imagine that would stop the bullet? I have no idea—it was an automatic reaction). They dragged us out of the car, held guns to our heads, and finally let us go, after a long negotiation and a realization on their part that we were just four hapless, unarmed journalists.
People have asked me if I wasn’t sorry I didn’t have a gun. I am not. Had we been armed, we would have been killed for sure, as we would have been seen as combatants. But more importantly, we would never have been able to respond quickly enough to stop any attack. Life is not a James Bond movie. With the exception of trained police and soldiers, none of us is going to be able to respond quickly and accurately enough to stop someone from shooting a gun.
The murder-suicide is a wrenching tragedy, and it should indeed engender all sorts of conversations about domestic violence and the head injuries which can affect football payers’ behavior. But refusing to talk about the role of firearms in the deaths of two young people is another tragedy. And it would create more.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 4, 2012
“The Gun Frenzy”: Nothing Warms The Heart For The Holidays Like Cold Steel
President Obama’s election and recent re-election have apparently fueled a gun-buying craze in this country unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times.
USA Today reported this week:
“For the second consecutive year, prospective gun buyers joined Black Friday shoppers in record numbers as firearms dealers swamped the F.B.I. with required buyer background check requests. The F.B.I. fielded 154,873 calls, a roughly 20 percent increase from last year’s previous one-day record of 129,166, according to bureau records. The requests came in such volume throughout the day that F.B.I. call centers experienced two brief outages — one of 18 minutes and one for 14 minutes — during the busy day, bureau spokesman Stephen Fischer said Monday.”
As the report made clear:
“The F.B.I. does not track actual gun sales. But the number of firearms sold Friday is likely higher because multiple firearms can be included in one transaction by a single buyer.”
According to the F.B.I.’s data, the number of requests for background checks normally peaks toward the end of the year. Nothing warms the heart for the holidays like cold steel.
The F.B.I. has conducted nearly 156 million background checks for gun purchases from November 1998 to October 2012 (the last month for which they have published data) and a full 40 percent of those checks occurred in just the four years since President Obama was first elected.
This week the popular conservative Web site World Net Daily quoted the National Rifle Association spokeswoman Jacqueline Otto as saying that the N.R.A. is not surprised by the surging gun sales because gun owners “are very informed voters and they have known that President Obama has opposed our Second Amendment rights his entire political career.”
Then they quoted her as follows:
“Gun sales are undoubtedly going up because gun owners know that at best President Obama wants to make guns and ammunition more expensive through increased taxes and regulation, and at worst he wants to make them totally illegal.”
That’s the N.R.A. line. Here is the reality. The president has done almost nothing in his first term to restrict gun ownership. As The Washington Post’s blog The Fix reported in July:
“The president signed bills allowing guns in national parks and on Amtrak. He has not pushed for the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban — and Attorney General Eric Holder was reportedly chastised for suggesting he would. Nor has he moved towards closing the gun-show loophole.”
That loophole allows guns to be bought from private dealers at gun shows without a background check.
During the second presidential debate with Mitt Romney, however, Obama said:
“But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced, but part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence, because frankly, in my hometown of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence, and they’re not using AK-47s, they’re using cheap handguns.”
That’s sounds mild and logical to me, but the N.R.A. took it as a shot across the bow. They started running ads in swing states that said, “Defend freedom, defeat Obama.”
In fact, it should be noted that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, gun lobbyists contributed more than $3 million in the 2012 election cycle, and 96 percent of those contributions went to Republicans. That was the highest percentage going to Republicans since the center began providing comparable data.
The World Net Daily article also pointed out that “gun owners also are worried because just hours after Obama’s re-election, the U.S. signaled its support for a U.N. committee’s call to renew debate over a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade.”
But as Reuters pointed out this month: “U.S. officials have acknowledged privately that the treaty under discussion would have no effect on domestic gun sales and ownership because it would apply only to exports.”
And it’s not like we need more guns, anyway. The United States has more guns per capita than any country on the planet.
All the while, stocks of gun makers are going through the roof. Smith & Wesson’s stock is up 280 percent since last year. Sturm, Ruger and Company’s stock is up 96 percent from last year.
Welcome to the Great American Arming.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 29, 2012
“Contempt For The Mainstream”: Republican Platform Deletes All Memory Of Moderation
The campaign platform adopted by the Republican party this week became instantly notorious for its plunge to the right, deleting all memory of moderation in previous years. The document might be even more remarkable, however, for its tone of utter defiance.
No one expected the party to soften its support for gun rights, even after the Aurora shooting. But despite the national horror at the deaths of 12 people and the injuries to 58 others, Republicans deliberately added a plank to this year’s platform intended to inflame the gun debate.
As the Associated Press reports, the platform contains this new line: “We oppose legislation that is intended to restrict our Second Amendment rights by limiting the capacity of clips or magazines.” High-capacity magazines, which allow attackers to shoot more people quickly, without reloading, were used in both in Aurora and in the Tucson shooting that injured the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six. There is no Second Amendment right to shoot without reloading, and even many supporters of the right to bear arms oppose the easy availability of big clips, which used to be illegal.
The platform also supports the “stand your ground” laws that played a role in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Florida earlier this year. Where the 2008 platform said that citizens have the right to a gun at home for self-defense, the new one adds a line supporting “the fundamental right to self-defense wherever a law-abiding citizen has a legal right to be.”
On another contentious issue, the platform reverses course on disclosure of political donors, sticking a thumb in the eye of previous generations of Republicans who believed that full disclosure was the antidote to unlimited contributions. As Paul Blumenthal of the Huffington Post reported today, earlier platforms going back to 1996 supported full disclosure, but the current version says exactly the opposite.
“We oppose any restrictions or conditions that would discourage Americans from exercising their constitutional right to enter the political fray or limit their commitment to their ideals,” the document says, explaining why it opposes passage of the Disclose Act, which would end the use of secret donations fueling so many of this year’s attack ads.
After the Citizens United decision, Republicans realized they would gain a huge financial advantage if corporations and executives were allowed to give unlimited sums without fear of public embarrassment. Led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, they constructed a First-Amendment theory to fit this benefit, saying that secrecy protects free speech (for corporations) without worry of harassment.
Now the party has enshrined that political greed and expediency in its fundamental declaration of principles. Although “principles” seems too high-minded a word for these statements of contempt for the mainstream.
By: David Firestone, The New York Times Opinion Pages, August 30, 2012
“Political Stockholm Syndrome”: Rationalizing Gutlessness On Guns
Talk about power: The gun lobby barely had to say a word before the media sent advocates of saner gun regulation shuffling off in defeat.
In a political version of Stockholm syndrome, even those who claim to disagree with the National Rifle Association’s absolutist permissiveness on firearms lulled themselves into accepting the status quo by reciting a script of gutless resignation dictated by the merchants of death.
It’s a script built on half-truths and myths. For example, polls showing declining support for gun control in the abstract were widely cited, while polls showing broad backing for carefully tailored laws were largely ignored.
Arguments that gun regulation won’t accomplish anything were justified with citations of academic studies that offer mixed or inconclusive verdicts. In the wake of last week’s killings in Colorado, these studies were deployed to hide the elephant in the room: Our country is the scene of more gun deaths than any other wealthy nation in the world. And it isn’t even close.
A study last year in the Journal of Trauma-Injury Infection & Critical Care analyzed gun death statistics for 2003 from the World Health Organization Mortality Database. It found that 80 percent of all firearms deaths in 23 industrialized countries occurred in the United States. For women, the figure rose to 86 percent; for children age 14 and under, to 87 percent. Can anyone seriously claim that our comparatively lax gun laws had nothing to do with these blood-drenched data?
Some of the evasions are couched in compassion. We are told that the real answer to mass slaughter lies not in better gun statutes but in more attentiveness to those afflicted with psychological problems.
Yes, we need better treatment for the mentally distressed. But while we build a better system of care for mental illness — and, by the way, nobody talks concretely about how to create and pay for such a system — isn’t the more direct solution to ban automatic weapons and oversize magazines so that when someone does go off the rails, it won’t be possible for him to shoot off close to 100 rounds in 100 seconds? And why shouldn’t we make it harder for such a person to buy the instruments of slaughter online?
Regulations, it is said, just won’t work. Bad people will get guns somehow. But if that were true, why did the assault-weapons ban work? If regulation is futile, why do we bother to regulate safety in so many other ways? We manage to prevent needless deaths through rules on refrigerators, automobiles and children’s toys, yet politics blocks us from keeping up to date on the regulation of firearms, whose very purpose is to kill.
We’re told that no laws will end all human tragedies. That’s true. And if the standard for a useful law is that it must put an end to all tragedies and solve all problems, there is no point in passing any laws at all.
Those of us who believe in sensible steps to regulate weapons are supposed to bow before this catalogue of despair and shut up. Most liberal politicians are doing just that. It does not seem to occur to them that the general idea of gun control is bound to recede in the polls when so many advocates of popular regulations give up on making their case.
Bad arguments prevail when they go unanswered. That, by the way, is why it’s not enough for advocates of a sensible course on guns to think their job is over if they write one impassioned column or make one strong statement after a mass killing — and then move on to the latest campaign flap.
The polls still show considerable support for practical measures to curb gun violence. For example: a 2011 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 63 percent of Americans favor a ban on high-capacity magazines; just as many supported an assault-weapons ban. The same year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 83 percent supported financing a system in which people treated for mental illness would be reported to a federal gun registry database to prevent them from buying guns; 71 percent favored this for those treated for drug abuse.
Such numbers should give heart to those who seek solutions to gun violence. Yet so many progressive donors have given up on financing the cause of gun safety. And although President Obama took an important step forward in a New Orleans speech Wednesday night, so many progressive politicians sit back and assume that the gun lobby will win again.
There is a word for this: surrender.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 25, 2012
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