“Eeerily Similar Marketing Stragety Of The Tobacco Industry”: Gun Industry Aims To Sell Youth On Assault Weapons
Responding to Americans’ declining interest in shooting sports, gun manufacturers are developing programs to market their products to younger children. The National Shooting Sports Foundation trade association and the industry-funded National Rifle Association spend millions of dollars annually to recruit kids as gun enthusiasts. And those efforts increasingly focus on pushing semi-automatic assault weapons, including the very model used by the shooter in the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy.
The New York Times reports:
The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15 — an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one — the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent.
“Who knows?” it said. “Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!”
The industry’s youth-marketing effort is backed by extensive social research and is carried out by an array of nonprofit groups financed by the gun industry, an examination by The New York Times found. The campaign picked up steam about five years ago with the completion of a major study that urged a stronger emphasis on the “recruitment and retention” of new hunters and target shooters.
Federal law prohibits the sale of rifles to those under age 18. But through programs at Boy Scout camps and 4-H clubs, the NRA trains children on how to safely shoot single-shot rifles. And, according to the report: “Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach ‘life skills’ like responsibility, ethics and citizenship.”
This effort seems eerily similar to the marketing strategy employed by the tobacco industry in the 1980s. Recognizing that the number of smokers in America was declining — and dying off — cigarette companies sought to addict underage children to ensure a continuing market for their product. A now infamous 1981 Philip Morris corporate memo noted that “[t]oday’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens. In addition, the 10 years following the teenage years is the period during which average daily consumption per smoker increases to the average adult level. The smoking patterns of teenagers are particularly important to Philip Morris.”
One gun-industry study noted a similar need to “start them young,” observing that “stakeholders such as managers and manufacturers should target programs toward youth 12 years old and younger… This is the time that youth are being targeted with competing activities. It is important to consider more hunting and target-shooting recruitment programs aimed at middle school level, or earlier.”
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, January 27, 2013
“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
“Looney Tunes”: The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Is Back, And As Crazy As Ever
Well, NRA crackpot Wayne LaPierre is back. He’s been laying low for a month, after his crackpot performances immediately after the Newtown mass murder, but the NRA apparently decided that (1) Obama’s inaugural speech was all about them, and (2) they needed, really, the biggest goddamn crackpot they could find to go up and “rebut” the mean things the president said. So here’s Wayne!
“Obama wants to turn the idea of absolutism into a dirty word,” LaPierre said. “Just another word for extremism. He wants you, all of you, and Americans throughout all of this country, to accept the idea of principles as he sees fit. It’s a way of redefining words so that common sense is turned upside down and that nobody knows the difference.” […]
It’s just like that guy once said, after all. [Absolutism] in defense of [any random citizen’s right to mow down classrooms full of elementary school children] is no vice—and how dare you attack the NRA for thinking so. LaPierre then, apparently, rejected all of his own past statements about how maybe we should enforce laws and make lists of batshit crazy people, asserting instead that Obama wants to make a national list of gun owners in order to, ya know, oppress them later. So now he’s against background checks.
“He wants to put every private, personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government,” LaPierre said. “He wants to keep all of those names in a massive federal registry. There’s only two reasons for a federal list on gun owners: to either tax ‘em or take ‘em. That’s the only reasons. And anyone who says that’s excessive, President Obama says that’s an absolutist.”
You see there? Last month Citizen Wayne here wanted us to make a list of all the people with dangerous mental problems in the country. Now he’s pissed off that someone’s suggesting maybe we use a list like that to make sure dangerous people don’t get guns, because that’d be just too infringing. Apparently that earlier list of dangerous, unbalanced Americans LaPierre suggested we create was merely supposed to be a list the NRA could use for their next membership drive.
If anyone was wondering whether the murder of 20 children would result in a moment of reflection by the off-the-rails NRA and other members of the gun lobby, I think we have our answer. There was a delay of, what, a week or so while LaPierre and others pondered how best to tell us that the murders were just fine, because trying to do something about them would be far worse. Then they stood up in front of the TV cameras and told America to go right to hell, because there was nothing, at least nothing that didn’t involve buying and using more guns, that they were going to “allow” us to do about it. No change in gun safety regulations; no change in who can buy guns, and how specifically those guns can be designed for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of people quickly; no nothing. If our communities want to afford themselves a little more safety, LaPierre explicitly says, the only way the fetishists are going to allow it is if it involves more people shooting at each other, not fewer.
We may be at the point where we can safely write these people off. We were at the point a while ago, of course, but if Wayne here keeps talking, we may be at the point where the thoroughly pistol-whipped Congress figures that out as well. We can hope, anyway.
By: Hunter, The Daily Kos, January 26, 2013
“A New Awareness”: How The NRA Undermined Congress’ Last Push For Gun Control
Last week, President Obama unveiled sweeping proposals on gun control, including a ban on military-style assault weapons, a reduction of ammunition magazine capacity and stiffer background checks on gun buyers.
National Rifle Association president David Keene quickly accused the Obama administration of being opportunistic. The president is “using our children to pursue an ideological anti-gun agenda,” he said.
The NRA has already begun to lobby on Capitol Hill to counter the administration’s effort.
To get a sense of what the NRA might do, it’s helpful to look at how it scored a victory during the last major federal initiative to tighten gun control.
After a Virginia Tech student killed 32 students and faculty in April 2007, the Bush administration proposed legislation that would require all states to share the names of residents involuntarily committed to mental health facilities. The information would be provided to a Federal Bureau of Investigation database.
The idea, in part, was to help gun dealers get important information about whether potential customers were mentally ill.
In order to get the support of the NRA, Congress agreed to two concessions that had long been on the agenda of gun-rights advocates — concessions that later proved to hamstring the database.
The NRA wanted the government to change the way it deemed someone “mentally defective,” excluding people, for example, who were no longer under any psychiatric supervision or monitoring. The group also pushed for a way for the mentally ill to regain gun rights if they could prove in court that they’d been rehabilitated.
The NRA found allies on both sides of the aisle to champion the concessions.
Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) reportedly pushed the provisions, ultimately with the support of the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), whose husband was killed and her son wounded in a 1993 shooting on the Long Island Railroad.
The NRA agreed to support the bill, in exchange for provisions pushing states to create gun rights restoration programs.
Here’s how it worked. It would cost money for states to share their data: A state agency would have to monitor the courts, collect the names of people who had been institutionalized, and then send that information to the FBI on a regular basis.
So, to help pay for data-sharing, Congress created $375 million in annual federal grants and incentives. But to be eligible for the federal money, the states would have to set up a gun restoration program approved by the Justice Department. No gun rights restoration program, no money to help pay for sharing data.
A spokesman for Dingell’s office did not respond to calls for comment on this story. A McCarthy spokesman, Shams Tarek, said the congresswoman is now working on new legislation to “provide more incentives and stiffen penalties for states to put names in the database.”
“We definitely think there’s a lot of room for improvement,” said Tarek.
The NRA supported Dingell and McCarthy’s version of the bill, but the group won further concessions when the legislation reached the Senate.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) who once joked he’d like to bring a gun with him to the Senate floor, blocked the legislation, citing concerns about privacy and spending.
He negotiated language that, among other things, would allow a person’s application for gun rights restoration to be granted automatically if an agency didn’t respond within 365 days of the application and allowed people to have their attorney’s fees reimbursed if they were forced to go to court to restore their rights.
The final bill was sent to President Bush for his signature in January, 2008.
The NRA praised Coburn and released a statement calling the law a victory for gun owners: “After months of careful negotiation, pro-gun legislation was passed through Congress today.” (The NRA didn’t respond to calls for comment.)
In an email, a Coburn spokesman told ProPublica that the senator “does not operate as an agent of the NRA when considering legislation regarding gun rights” and pointed to a recent statement on the president’s gun proposals. (In the statement, Coburn said he supports improving the mental health database, but said overall, “we first must ensure our Constitutional rights and individual liberties.”)
Since the bill’s passage, two analyses have shown that National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database has significant gaps, partly because of the way the NRA managed to tweak the legislation. Many states aren’t sharing all of their mental health records.
A July 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that while the overall number of records increased exponentially since the law passed, the rise is largely due to cooperation from just 12 states.
The nonprofit group Mayors Against Illegal Guns also released a report in 2011 showing that many states have failed to fulfill their obligations to report data on the mentally ill to the federal government. While Virginia and a few others have disclosed tens of thousands of records, 23 others and the District of Columbia reported fewer than 100 records. Seventeen states reported fewer than 10 records and four submitted no data at all.
“Millions of records identifying seriously mentally ill people and drug abusers as prohibited purchasers are missing from the federal background check database because of lax reporting by state agencies,” the report said.
According to the report, the reasons for such uneven compliance vary by state. Some states don’t turn over data because their privacy laws prevent them from doing so. Some states have a different interpretation on what kind of data needs to be provided, or what, exactly, constitutes “mentally ill” or “involuntarily committed.”
Still others simply can’t afford the expense of gleaning the data from the courts, providing it to the relevant state agency and then passing it on to the federal government.
The NRA-backed language creates problems for these states.
As a New York Times investigation found, many states haven’t qualified for federal funding to share their data because they haven’t established gun rights restoration programs.
In 2012, only 12 states received federal grants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
A Coburn spokesman pointed out that some states have had trouble setting up restoration programs because gun control advocates in those states have protested them.
While mental health data has remained sparse, some states have made it easier for the mentally ill to restore their gun rights. As the Times noted, in Virginia some people have regained rights to guns by simply writing a letter to the state. Other Virginians got their rights back just weeks or months after being hospitalized for psychiatric care.
It’s difficult to know just how many people in Virginia have had their gun rights restored because no agency is responsible for keeping track.
Despite the limitations of the mental health database, some gun control advocates still see it as better than nothing.
“The fact that so many states have been able to get so many records into the database does demonstrate a willingness on the part of certain groups to work on this issue and that’s a good sign. The others really need to step up,” said Lindsay Nichols, a staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The group, then known as the Legal Community Against Violence, was one of several gun control organizations that opposed the legislation when it was first signed into law.
Nichols is optimistic that the NRA won’t succeed in commandeering the gun control debate the way the group did after Virginia Tech.
“I think there’s new awareness among the public and legislators that we need to take this issue seriously and it’s not an issue where the public is going to accept political wrangling.”
By: Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, January 25, 2013
“Violent And Filled With Rage”: American Gun Violence Is An Epidemic
Just another day in gunner’s paradise…
Another day, another shooting. I would imagine if this continues, and I fear it might, that Americans will become desensitized—if they haven’t already. Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Oregon, Newtown, Albuquerque, and now Houston. Of course there will be those that say, well, at least it wasn’t a massacre. Hmm…
The problem is, they’re all linked by three things: guns, violence, and rage.
We as a society have to ask ourselves, why is it that our neighbors to the north, Canada, have guns, hunt, watch the same TV shows and movies as we do—why do we have a level of violence that is simply not on par with the rest of the Western world? And if we look to the Eastern world, like Japan; they not only watch our movies, but many Japanese films and certainly video games that are much more violent. But, they don’t have the guns.
So those of us on the left propose to reduce the type of guns our society, which is obviously very violent and filled with rage—has access to. Those on the right say that won’t stop gun violence. And they’re right. It’s a piece of a much needed, comprehensive, multifacted approach to save our kids, our future, and dare I say our country, from…ourselves.
Now some on both the left and right will blame mental illness. Sorry folks, not everyone who’s violent, enraged, owns a gun, and uses it suffers from mental illness. And with the National Rifle Association and others on the right pushing back on ideas such as tougher background checks, like at gun shows. Well, I guess we’ll keep those mentally ill types pretty well armed.
And of course there are the movies, television, and video games. As someone who lives in Los Angeles and lives about 20 minutes from La La Land (a.k.a. Hollywood), let me explain something to you: Hollywood’s a business. And businesses care about one thing: money. Their bottom line. Here’s a simple, little economic principle: supply and demand. You think the movies and TV shows our kids are watching are too violent? Then stop buying tickets. If you line up en masse for those cute romantic comedies and ignore the more violent Terminator-type films, Hollywood will supply you with what you demand.
So since some say we can’t blame the guns, some say we can’t blame the people owning the guns, some say it’s the mentally ill but don’t want further controls and certainly don’t want to pay for any type of mental illness programs or hospitals or medications—since we’re the ones buying those violent video games, TV shows, and movies, what’s left?
Look in the mirror.
As the parent or a 4 and 5 year old, I notice that the way I handle my stress is the way they handle theirs. They’re imitators. So for every parent out there that’s watching Die Hard or The Godfather in front of your toddler and you think they’re too busy playing with their Elmo, think again. Their brain is absorbing that flick, frame by frame. And for those of you who knock out a wall, or perhaps your wife or girlfriend every time you get ticked off, our kids are watching.
America, we are responsible for those that died. For ignoring our culture of rage and violence far too long…and for not correcting those behaviors within ourselves. This isn’t just systemic, it’s epidemic. So what are we as a nation going to do about it?
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, January 23, 2013
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