“Uzi Accident Sparks Debate About Children And Guns”: Why Would A Parent Or A State Allow A Child To Handle Automatic Weapons?
It was the kind of story that was hard to miss yesterday. A 9-year-old girl, on vacation with her family, was given an Uzi to fire at the Last Stop shooting range in White Hills, Ariz. When the child couldn’t control the submachine gun’s recoil, she accidentally killed her instructor, 39-year-old Charles Vacca.
It’s generating some overdue conversation.
In the aftermath of the tragic death of a gun-range instructor killed by a 9-year-old girl who wasn’t able to control an Uzi 9mm submachine gun, many are raising questions about whether it is safe – or even legal – for young children to handle powerful firearms.
Arizona, where the incident happened on Monday, is one of 21 states that has no laws restricting the access of guns to minors under 18, as long as there is adult supervision.
Twenty-nine states have child access prevention laws. Fourteen prohibit someone from “intentionally, knowingly, and/or recklessly providing some or all firearms to children,” according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The Arizona Republic’s E.J. Montini ran a compelling piece with a notable headline: “Why do we allow a child to handle an Uzi?”
The columnist wrote, “Arizona law allows a minor to possess a weapon if accompanied by a parent, guardian or an instructor. But this type of weapon? It’s time we asked ourselves: Why would a shooting range allow a kid to handle an automatic weapon? Why would a parent? And, most importantly, why would a state?”
A New York Times report added that these ranges have become popular tourist attractions. People can “fire the weapons of their dreams: automatic machine guns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers. A hamburger lunch is included; a helicopter tour of the nearby Grand Canyon is optional.”
And while the public comes to terms with the propriety of these activities, we might also want to ask a related question: who’s in charge of the NRA’s social-media operation?
Yesterday afternoon, with much of the country stunned by the images out of Arizona, an official NRA twitter feed published a link to “7 Ways Children Can Have Fun at the Shooting Range.” This isn’t a joke. In fact, I took a screen grab of the message.
It’s worth noting that the gun group eventually unpublished the tweet, but not before many wondered aloud what in the world the NRA could have been thinking.
MSNBC’s Nick Ramsey added yesterday, “ ‘Think before tweeting’ is advice everyone on social media can use, but particularly those behind the Twitter handle @NRAWomen.”
Truer words were never spoken.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 28, 2014
“And The Shootings Continue”: 2013, The Year We Learned Gun Reform Is Impossible
Nothing in 2013 matched the horror of Sandy Hook or Aurora, but the year proved to be a dispiriting one for gun-control crusaders hoping to capitalize on the intense outpouring of grief wrought by 2012’s shooting massacres.
After Newtown, President Obama gave an impassioned speech promising to do everything in his power to prevent “more tragedies like this.” We’d watched these scenes of public mourning before—after Tucson, after Aurora—but it was different this time. Obama’s bold declaration that “we are not doing enough and we will have to change” seemed more forceful than before. And coming just six weeks after his reelection, it seemed more possible.
But once the National Rifle Association and others got a whiff of any serious threat to firearm freedoms, they moneyed up. Although gun-control groups spent five times as much on federal lobbying in 2013 as they did in 2012, according to data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, gun-rights groups outpaced them by more than 7-to-1.
As usual, the NRA’s efforts paid off. Watered-down legislation that would have expanded background checks failed in the Senate this past spring, and the issue retook its place in Congress as a perennial nonstarter.
And the shootings continued.
But Congress delivered gun-reform advocates one final 2013 disappointment this week. The Senate on Monday voted to renew the Undetectable Firearms Act just hours before the 25-year-old law was set to expire. The 10-year extension, which even the National Rifle Association endorsed, is largely genteel. It keeps on the books a ban on firearms that can sneak through metal detectors, but efforts by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to close what he called a “dangerous loophole” allowing a person to use 3-D printing technology to craft a plastic gun failed to get off the ground. Schumer wanted to amend the law to require that firearms have permanent metal pieces in them.
Gun-control advocates have seen some movement outside of Congress. In September, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz declared guns unwelcome in his stores, even in states with open-carry laws. Colorado’s State House passed stricter gun laws, though members did so at great political peril. Connecticut adopted some of the strictest in the nation, despite being home to several gun manufacturers. And Obama did pass a number of executive orders that make small inroads, such as restricting the import of military surplus weapons and ordering federal agencies to share more data with the background-check system.
But national lawmakers in 2013 did what they do every year when it comes to tightening gun restrictions: nothing.
“It should be a source of great embarrassment to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that we have not moved the ball forward one inch when it comes to the issue of protecting the thousands of people all across this country who are killed by guns every year,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., before Monday’s vote of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which passed by unanimous consent.
2012’s gun violence brought us unprecedented grief. But 2013 reminded us just how impossible it is to move that ball forward. If a deranged man killing 20 kids and six teachers at an elementary school won’t prompt meaningful gun reform, it’s hard to imagine what will.
By: Dustin Volz, The National Journal, December 10, 2013
“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
“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
“When A Gun Advocate Dissents”: In The Gun World, Straying From The Party Line Leads To Vilification And Condemnation
It’s not as if Dick Metcalf was some kind of gun control fanatic.
On the contrary, he’s a gun guy through and through, such an unyielding defender of the Second Amendment that last year he led the charge to push through a law giving the residents of Pike County, Ill., where he lives, the right to carry concealed guns without a permit. He called the practice “constitutional carry” rather than “concealed carry.”
In the early 1980s, he and a handful of friends started a successful gun club, called the Pike Adams Sportsmen’s Alliance, which is located on Metcalf’s farm in Barry, Ill. A few years later, he played an important role in lobbying for the federal Firearm Owners Protection Act, which loosened many of the gun restrictions that had become law after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. A friend of his told me that Metcalf had even written some of the language in the bill.
Mostly, though, Metcalf, 67, was known as a writer for magazines owned by InterMedia Outdoors, a publisher of gun periodicals that include the industry bible, Guns & Ammo. He did videos on subjects like “Guns for Family Home Defense” and wrote articles with headlines like “Smith & Wesson’s 12 Most Important Guns.”
It is perfectly understandable, then, that the gun world might be a little taken aback by Metcalf’s opinion piece in the December issue of Guns & Ammo calling for some modest gun regulation. “I firmly believe that all U.S. citizens have a right to keep and bear arms,” he wrote, “but I do not believe that they have a right to use them irresponsibly.” The article went on to call for mandatory training for gun owners. That’s all. Such limited regulation, he argued, did not constitute an infringement on anyone’s constitutional rights.
When people like me read an article like that, it seems momentarily possible that gun advocates and gun control advocates might be able to find some common ground. Much in the way that many gun control activists have come to accept the legitimacy of the Second Amendment — something that hasn’t always been the case — here was a man on the other side of the divide saying that some sensible regulation didn’t necessarily lead down a “slippery slope” to confiscation. If we are ever to have a sane gun policy, we desperately need people from both camps to meet somewhere in the middle.
But when people like me see the reaction from gun advocates to Metcalf’s tame proposal, it all seems hopeless again. Robert Farago, who maintains a blog called The Truth About Guns, started the ball rolling by linking to — and denouncing — Metcalf’s “diatribe.” He went on to describe the article as a “bone-headed, uninformed, patently obvious misinterpretation of the Second Amendment.” Other bloggers piled on. On the Guns & Ammo Facebook page, subscribers demanded Metcalf’s head, even as they canceled their subscriptions.
Finally, according to a blog post Metcalf wrote, two major gun manufacturers told InterMedia Outdoors that they would pull all their advertising if something wasn’t done. That’s all it took. Within 24 hours, Metcalf was permanently banned from the company’s publications. And the longtime editor of Guns & Ammo, Jim Bequette, who was planning to retire at the end of the year, was pushed out as well.
Before departing, however, Bequette wrote a groveling apology, which ran on the magazine’s website. He described his decision to publish Metcalf’s article as “a mistake” and took pains to remind readers that Guns & Ammo had always been the hardest of hard-liners. “It is no accident that when others in the gun culture counseled compromise in the past, hard-core thinkers…found a place and a voice in these pages,” he wrote. With that, capitulation was complete.
If you want to understand why so few gun owners are willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association, even though the majority disagree with the N.R.A.’s most extreme positions, here was a vivid example. Straying from the party line leads to vilification and condemnation that would give anybody pause.
My guess is that Dick Metcalf always knew what he was in for — all the more reason writing his article took guts. In the aftermath, he was the only one who could still hold his head up high. On a blog called The Outdoor Wire, he wrote a lengthy response to his critics. He didn’t back down one iota. Describing himself as “disappointed” at the reaction to his article, he added, “If a respected editor can be forced to resign and a controversial writer’s voice be shut down by a one-sided social-media and Internet outcry, virtually overnight, simply because they dared to open a discussion or ask questions about a politically sensitive issue…then I fear for the future of our industry, and for our Cause.”
Maybe there’s hope yet.
By: Joe Nocera, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 8, 2013
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