“A Year After Newtown, Little Has Changed”: Don’t Blame Fate, Blame These Politicians
The first anniversary of the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School weighs heavily, above all, for the unfathomable nature of the crime and unfathomable grief of the families. Adding to that weight, though, is the demoralization over the fact that the massacre has not led to any broad national policy response to the problem of gun violence. If there is any doubt that this failure had exacerbated the pain of the families, consider this haunting line from one of the reports on the April failure of the post-massacre gun-law reform bill: “Mr. Obama hugged the brother of one victim, Daniel Barden, who was 7, and told him to take care of his mother, who was sobbing quietly.”
Since April, there has been all manner of rationalization and second-guessing about how this failure happened. The administration should never let itself get sidetracked by the gun issue to begin with. The president should have done more to push for the legislation, which was dubbed Manchin-Toomey. Or perhaps he should have done less. Maybe, though the Newtown families fell in line with the law enforcement and gun control groups who wanted expanded background checks, the bill should have focused more narrowly on reforms that directly addressed what had happened in Newtown.
In the coming New York Times Magazine, Robert Draper does us all a service by breaking through some of the second-guessing in order to analyze just how the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups managed to block a measure that polls showed were supported by some 90 percent of Americans. His conclusion is not so different from the one I reached, in slightly more optimistic tones, last spring: As confounding as the NRA’s win was, there’s reason to believe that, in “unsteady little increments,” its influence is being reduced.
However, even Draper’s deeply-reported look at the NRA runs the risk of diverting attention from this simple fact: Last April, 100 senators had the opportunity to vote on sensible gun-law reforms that many Newtown families were pleading for. And 46 of them decided to vote against it, which in the contemporary Senate was enough to kill the bill. Each vote counts the same, but here, for posterity’s sake, are some “no’s” that stood out in particular:
Kelly Ayotte
The first-term Republican from New Hampshire is a former prosecutor and state attorney general and thus well acquainted with the porousness of gun laws, which require background checks at licensed dealerships to screen for past felonies or dangerous mental illness, but not at the gun shows or private sales where an estimated 40 percent of transactions occur. Voting for background checks would hardly hurt Ayotte’s general election chances in New Hampshire, a state Obama won by six points against a part-time New Hampshire resident, which has prompted speculation that her vote was cast to protect her prospects for a national GOP ticket. Confronted after the vote by Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal, Ayotte gave a dissembling explanation that sent Lafferty striding from the room.
Max Baucus
The Montana Democrat has been allied with the NRA ever since voting for the 1994 assault weapons ban, an experience that he “felt he had paid dearly for,” according to a Baucus staffer quoted by Draper. Gun control supporters hoped they would get Baucus on this bill, though, given its moderation and the fact that he is nearing the end of his career – indeed, shortly after casting his vote, he announced that he is retiring. But he voted no nonetheless, a decision he explained thusly: “Montanans have told me loud and clear that they oppose any new gun controls.” These must not be the same Montanans who told pollsters, by a solid majority, that they backed expanded background checks, or the ones being listened to by Jon Tester, Baucus’s fellow Montana Democrat, who has many more elections ahead of him. He voted yes.
Jeff Flake
The freshman Republican from Arizona is quite conservative, but gun control advocates had high hopes for him because of his close relationship with his fellow Arizonan Gabrielle Giffords. When the congresswoman was shot in the head by a gunman in 2011, Flake was one of the first to rush to her side in the hospital. In early April, he sent a hand-written note to another Arizonan touched by gun violence, the mother of a young man killed in the Aurora cinema shooting, writing that “strengthening background checks is something we agree on.” In a Capitol hallway just before the vote, as the New York Times reported, “Ms. Giffords, who still struggles to speak because of the damage that a bullet did to her brain, grabbed Mr. Flake’s arm and tried — furiously and with difficulty — to say that she had needed his vote. The best she could get out was the word ‘need.’” She didn’t get it. Flake faced a serious backlash back home, but, not facing reelection until 2018, shrugged it off: “That’s the beauty of a six-year term.”
Heidi Heitkamp
The freshman Democrat from North Dakota hails from a red state, but does not face reelection again until 2018. That puts her in a similar position as Joe Donnelly, the conservative Democrat from Indiana. He voted for Manchin-Toomey. Heitkamp voted against it, citing the many phone calls she’d gotten against the bill: “I’ve heard overwhelmingly from the people of North Dakota; and at the end of the day my duty is to listen to and represent the people of North Dakota.” According to one poll, 79 percent of North Dakotans surveyed backed expanded background checks – a far higher rate than even in Montana.
Rob Portman
The Ohio Republican, George W. Bush’s former budget director, is considered one of the more moderate members of the Republican caucus, a reputation affirmed when he came out in support of same-sex marriage after learning that his son is gay. But, as Draper notes, it was this very announcement that helped set Portman against Manchin-Toomey:
Portman told [parents of slain Sandy Hook children who came to talk to him], “You know, I have an A rating from the N.R.A., so I’m probably not going to support this.” At some point, 13-year-old James Barden, a brother of one of the victims, spoke up. “Senator, there’s over a thousand deaths from gun violence in Ohio every year,” he said. “I’m here on behalf of my little brother, Daniel. Do you think that this bill would save some of those lives?”
Portman sat quietly for a moment. Then he said: “It could. It could.” But what the Republican senator did not say was that he had already disappointed conservatives by coming out in favor of same-sex marriage because of his openly gay son. By the spring of 2013 it had become axiomatic in the Senate that among the three incendiary social issues of the moment — gun restrictions, same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform — a moderate Democrat could afford to vote for two of them, and a conservative Republican only one. Portman had already selected his hot-button issue.
Also worth noting: having an A-rating from the NRA rating did not stop six other senators from backing the legislation, among them its co-sponsors, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, one of four Republicans to back the bill.
Mark Pryor
The Arkansas Democrat is up for reelection next year in a red state. That puts him in the same boat as Democrats Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. They voted for Manchin-Toomey nonetheless; he did not. Draper reports that Pryor was, like Baucus, haunted by the ghost of 1994, when his father, Senator David Pryor, voted for the assault weapons ban and “incurred the animus of the N.R.A.” But Pryor may have miscalculated – whereas Hagan and Landrieu enjoyed polling boosts from their vote for the bill, he did not, and all three now find themselves in trouble for unrelated reasons: the Obamacare rollout woes.
There are so many others that one could scrutinize as well: Ron Johnson and Dean Heller, Republicans from blue-state Wisconsin and Nevada; Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, who had declared a “sea change” in the politics of gun control after Newtown; Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who was leading the way in drafting a background-checks bill before a group to the right of the NRA started flooding his phones…All 46 had a choice and opted as they did.
I reached out to all of the above-mentioned no votes over the past two days to see if any of the senators were reassessing the issue and open to supporting a revised version of the bill. The only one that responded to the question on the record was the office of Senator Flake. Wrote his spokeswoman: “No, he’s not reassessing, and no, not open to a revised version.”
It’s not handwritten, but that Aurora mom Flake corresponded with surely gets the message.
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, December 12, 2013
“Who Needs A Gun?”: Most Of Us, Including Many Current Gun Owners, Don’t Have A Good Reason To Keep Guns In Their Homes
In September, Navy Yard; in November, a racially fraught shooting in Michigan and a proposed “stand-your-ground law” in Ohio; now the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre — there’s no avoiding the brutal reality of guns in America. Once again, we feel the need to say something, but we know the old arguments will get us nowhere. What’s the point of another impassioned plea or a new subtlety of constitutional law or further complex analyses of statistical data?
Our discussions typically start from the right to own a gun, go on to ask how, if at all, that right should be limited, and wind up with intractable disputes about the balance between the right and the harm that can come from exercising it. I suggest that we could make more progress if each of us asked a more direct and personal question: Should I own a gun?
A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.
Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.
Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good if I’m not trained to use it well. I may panic and shoot a family member coming home late, fumble around and allow an unarmed burglar to take my gun, have a cleaning or loading accident. The N.R.A. rightly sets high standards for gun safety. If those unable or unwilling to meet these standards gave up their guns, there might well be a lot fewer gun owners.
Guns do have uses other than defense against attackers. There may, for example, still be a few people who actually need to hunt to feed their families. But most hunting now is recreational and does not require keeping weapons at home. Hunters and their families would be much safer if the guns and ammunition were securely stored away from their homes and available only to those with licenses during the appropriate season. Target shooting, likewise, does not require keeping guns at home.
Finally, there’s the idea that citizens need guns so they can, if need be, oppose the force of a repressive government. Those who think there are current (or likely future) government actions in this country that would require armed resistance are living a paranoid fantasy. The idea that armed American citizens could stand up to our military is beyond fantasy.
Once we balance the potential harms and goods, most of us — including many current gun owners — don’t have a good reason to keep guns in their homes. This conclusion follows quite apart from whether we have a right to own guns or what restrictions should be put on this right. Also, the conclusion derives from what makes sense for each of us as individuals and so doesn’t require support from contested interpretations of statistical data.
I entirely realize that this line of thought will not convince the most impassioned gun supporters, who see owning guns as fundamental to their way of life. But about 70 million Americans own guns and only about four million belong to the N.R.A., which must include a large number of the most impassioned. So there’s reason to think that many gun owners would be open to reconsidering the dangers their weapons pose. Also, almost 30 percent of gun owners don’t think that guns make a household safer, and only 48 percent cite protection (rather than hunting, target shooting, etc.) as their main reason for having a gun.
It’s one thing to be horrified at gun violence. It’s something else to see it as a meaningful threat to your own existence. Our periodic shock at mass shootings and gang wars has little effect on our gun culture because most people don’t see guns as a particular threat to them. This is why opposition to gun violence has lacked the intense personal commitment of those who see guns as essential to their safety — or even their self-identity.
I’m not suggesting that opponents of gun violence abandon political action. We need to make it harder to buy guns (through background checks, waiting periods, etc.) both for those with criminal intentions and for law-abiding citizens who have no real need. But on the most basic level, much of our deadly violence occurs because we so often have guns readily available. Their mere presence makes suicide, domestic violence and accidents more likely. The fewer people with guns at hand, the less gun violence.
It’s easier to get people to see that they don’t want something than that they don’t have a right to it. Focusing on the need rather than the right to own a gun, many may well conclude that for them a gun is more a danger than a protection. Those fewer guns will make for a safer country.
By: Gary Gutting, The New York Times, December 10, 2013
“From Their Cold Dead Hands”: When You’re In The Business Of Arming Murderers, Murder Is Good For Business
This Saturday is the one-year anniversary of the Newtown shooting, and it’s remarkable where we’ve come in that time. In the weeks that followed, everyone said that now we could finally pass some sensible measures to stem the river of blood and death and misery that is the price we pay for America’s love of firearms. President Obama proposed some extraordinarily modest measures: enhanced background checks, limits on the kind of large-capacity magazines mass murderers find so useful, perhaps even a new ban on new sales to civilians of certain military-style weapons. Not a single thing that would keep a single law-abiding citizen from owning as many guns as he wants.
So here we are, a year later, and what has happened? First of all, at least 30,000 more Americans have had their lives cut short by guns; tens of thousands more were shot but survived. Around 200 children have been shot to death in that time—another 10 Newtowns. There was no federal legislation on guns. It died, because there are a sufficient number of Republicans (and a couple of Democrats) who, quite frankly, looked on one hand at a child getting murdered, and on the other hand at some armchair Rambo having to go a whole mile to the police station to get a background check before buying an AR-15 from his neighbor, and decided that the latter would be a greater moral outrage than the former.
And in the states, 109 new gun laws have passed, 39 of which restricted gun ownership in some way, and 70 of which expanded gun rights. While it’s true that the restrictive laws tended to be passed in larger states, no one could plausibly argue that the result of this seemingly once-in-a-generation moment for a new approach to guns was anything more than the same old approach to guns.
There’s a lengthy new report out from the American Psychological Association with lots of recommendations for what we can do to reduce the death toll, things like early interventions for those at risk of committing acts of violence and some modest (of course) policies restricting people with violent histories or certain kinds of mental illness from buying guns. All the recommendations are sensible, and if we did them all we’d certainly reduce the level of gun violence. By how much? It’s hard to say—maybe 5 percent, maybe 10 percent, maybe, if we’re being absurdly optimistic, 20 percent. Which would still mean tens of thousands of Americans killed every year with guns.
So it’s hard not to be cynical, to believe that there’s just nothing that can be done. I know that a lot of people I admire don’t like to hear that, but it’s how I’m feeling at the moment. If 20 elementary school kids getting mowed down wasn’t enough to make half of the country take a look at its insistence that everyone be armed to the teeth and say this is crazy, what would it take? A hundred kids murdered at one time? A thousand?
Not even that, I suspect. It’s their “culture” and they’re sticking to it. My dad took me hunting, and we bonded! And obviously, there’s no other way for a father and son to bond. I guess the majority of American fathers that don’t shoot with their kids aren’t bonding. Pity the fathers and sons in every other industrialized country in the world (all of which have more restrictive gun laws than we do), unable to bond at all.
So it’s hard to see when things are ever going to change except in tiny ways that don’t make much of an impact at all. Maybe I’m wrong, and real change could still happen. After all, rates of gun ownership are on a steady decline. Gun deaths have declined somewhat too, simply because there’s been an overall decline in crime over the last two decades.
But they’re still selling them as fast as they can make them. In fact, if you’re a gun manufacturer, you probably look back at Newtown as one of the best things that ever happened to your business. Sure, there’s some bad publicity, but what else follows a horrific mass shooting? Some futile talk of gun control, which makes it easy to convince your customers that owning four or five guns just isn’t enough—they need ten or twenty or thirty, because they could be outlawed any day! Sales go through the roof, but no meaningful legislation passes, and you pocket the profits. When you’re in the business of arming murderers, murder is good for business.
Again, maybe I’m wrong about the future. But with the Second Amendment—the Founders’ second-worst mistake, behind only the constitutional enshrinement of slavery—under no threat, nothing will change the fact that there’s a gun for every man, woman, and child in America. And the bodies will continue to pile up by the thousands, year after year after year.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 12, 2013
“Far-Reaching Consequences”: Obamacare, Mental Illness, And Guns
After years of delays, the Obama administration has released final regs aimed at implementing 2008 legislation requiring “parity” in insurance coverage of mental illness, as Jackie Calmes and Robert Pear of the New York Times report today:
The rules, which will apply to almost all forms of insurance, will have far-reaching consequences for many Americans. In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama’s program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders.
Remember gun violence?
In issuing the regulations, senior officials said, the administration will have acted on all 23 executive actions that the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced early this year to reduce gun crimes after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In planning those actions, the administration anticipated that gun control legislation would fail in Congress as pressure from the gun lobby proved longer-lasting than the national trauma over the killings of first graders and their caretakers last Dec. 14.
But there’s another big piece of the puzzle that is necessary to make sure mental health benefits are available to the people most at risk of committing acts of violence: the Affordable Care Act. As Harold Pollack explained in a major article in the March/April 2013 issue of the Washington Monthly, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion alone is a really big deal for people with mental illness and/or addictions who are prone to violence:
Why do so many people at risk—many of them young low-income men—fail to receive appropriate mental health services? The most important single reason is this: most are categorically ineligible for Medicaid. These men are not custodial parents. They are not veterans. They have not (yet) been diagnosed with federally recognized disabilities. Many get into trouble because they have serious drug or alcohol disorders. Since 1996, substance use disorders are no longer qualifying conditions for federal disability programs….
This will begin to change in 2014. That’s when the ACA will start providing subsidies that will eventually reach thirty-three million Americans without health insurance. An estimated sixteen million will eventually be covered by expanded Medicaid to low-income Americans with incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. That number will include the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill men cycling in and out of places like Chicago’s Cook County Jail and sleeping on grates in cities from Washington, D.C., to Seattle. For the first time, nearly all of these individuals (undocumented immigrants are the big exception) will gain access to regular health care. Moreover, if the law is properly implemented, these same individuals will gain access to mental health services that can reduce their propensity to commit violent acts.
So if you want some very good news about the impact of Obamacare, and some very bad consequences if it fails to be fully implemented, there you are.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 8, 2013
“Growing Numb To Mass Violence”: We Need To End The Sound Of Silence In Congress
What if we had a mass shooting and nobody noticed?
That gloomy thought came to mind as I listened to the unsettling sound of silence that followed the September 16 Navy Yard shooting in the nation’s capital that killed 12 people, plus the shooter.
Three days later it came to mind again as a shooting spree in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood made national news. Thirteen were injured, including a 3-year-old boy who was shot in the face. Four people have been charged in the reportedly gang-related incident.
President Obama eloquently expressed the grief, outrage and frustration that every decent American should feel about “yet another mass shooting” at the Navy Yard.
But overall reaction to the workplace slaughter by a reportedly deranged gunman was sadly and noticeably subdued compared to the national outrage that reignited the national gun debate following the massacre of 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut.
That’s because after all the anguish, debate and proposed legislation that emerged from the Newtown tragedy, the legislation was voted down in the Senate and everyone returned to other matters — like House Republicans voting uselessly to repeal Obamacare more than 40 times. Opposition to even modest measures was too strong, especially from rural centers of pro-gun culture.
If even the massacre of children and the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, could not move Congress to pass new gun safety measures, it’s no wonder that the energy for gun safety seems to have drained out of Capitol Hill.
But that doesn’t mean that we Americans can’t do anything but wring our hands over the continuing carnage. As even mass shootings lose their ability to shock us, both sides of the gun debate need to face a bracing reality: The gun violence problem is not only local and it’s not only about guns.
Those points were urgently expressed by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter in a joint speech in Washington last Thursday. They called for a new “surge” in attention and national action to the “virus” of gun-related violence.
Calls for national action are hardly new, but I was encouraged by the mayors’ refusal to be, as Landrieu put it, bogged down by the “seemingly mind-numbing debate about gun control.”
Instead they emphasized remedies everyone should be able to agree on. They included more cops on the street, as in a stronger COPS program — Community Oriented Policing Services — passed by Congress under President Bill Clinton; stronger cooperation with the federal government to target criminals with illegal guns and stronger measures against straw purchases and interstate gun traffickers.
Yet the two mayors also called for more personal responsibility and engagement by parents, pastors, coaches and neighbors. “Babies having babies just doesn’t work,” Landrieu said.
I’ve heard Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly left some scheduled meetings with members of Obama’s cabinet in Washington early after hearing of the mass shooting back home, express a similar agenda in his slogan: “Policing, prevention, penalties and parenting.”
Bottom line: A problem as complex as urban violence must be pushed back the same way it emerged: in every sector of community and political life.
But first we have to care. Citing the number of black men killed by homicide in his city in 2012, Nutter observed: “If the Ku Klux Klan came to Philadelphia and killed 236 black men, the city would be on lockdown.”
The same would be true if “international terrorists killed 236 Philadelphians of any race,” he said. “And, yet, 236 African-American men murdered in one city — not one word. No hearings on the Hill, no investigations … nothing but silence.”
We need to end the sound of silence. It was easier to take national political action in the ’90s. The economy was doing well and Congress was not as fiercely divided as it is today. But, as the two mayors said in Washington, we should not be more willing to pay for safe streets in Afghanistan than to make our streets safer at home.
By: Clarence Page, The National Memo, Featured Post, October 2, 2013
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