“Laughing Hyenas”: Props Of An Extremist Fringe Who Have Completely Lost Their Way And Any Sense Of Decency
The 41 Republican and four Democratic senators who voted to filibuster a bipartisan gun sale background check bill yesterday are rightfully losing friends quickly. After all, the bill they blocked was supported by over 90 percent of voters and 90 percent of gun owners. The backlash appropriately started the moment they voted to filibuster, as Patricia Maisch, a survivor of the 2011 Tucson mass shooting, yelled “Shame on you!” from the Senate balcony and told reporters “They have no soul. They have no compassion for the experiences people have lived through.” They then heard from President Obama, who called it a “shameful day for Washington.” Then, this morning they woke up to a no-holds-barred op-ed from former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, another tenacious survivor of the Tucson shooting, calling for every single one of them to be ousted from their jobs.
But these 45 senators still have friends. And it’s very telling who those friends are. The lobbying group Gun Owners of America immediately sent an email to its supporters praising the filibuster and taunting background check proponents, saying, “Well, guess who’s laughing now?” This is the same group that has claimed that expanded background checks would lead to a genocide against Christians, a Minority Report-style “pre-crime unit”, and even a race war.
Also happy with the filibuster was the National Association For Gun Rights, which called the background checks bill “draconian” and claimed it would lead to “confiscation” by “gun grabbers.”
And, of course, the National Rifle Association — the group that suggested the way to stop future school shootings was to put more guns in schools — was thrilled and “grateful” to the senators who had blocked the bill.
In his speech after the vote yesterday, President Obama said, “The American people are trying to figure out, how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen?” It can only happen if the other 10 percent has many times more power than you or I. And yesterday, these out-of-touch, extremist groups were celebrating the fact that they still had that power to stop any and all measures to curb gun violence.
Part of the reason that these groups are the ones “laughing now” is that they have the combined support of a wide array of conservative lobbying groups. As a recent People For the American Way report put it:
The NRA is not alone in attempting to prevent effective regulation of guns and promoting reckless policies that leave Americans vulnerable to crime. Its efforts are supported by the same kind of coalition that undermines the nation’s ability to solve a wide range of problems. Corporations, right-wing ideologues, and Religious Right leaders work together to misinform Americans, generate unfounded fears, and prevent passage of broadly supported solutions.
Although there was lots of competition for this dubious distinction, in one of the most offensive comments made by an opponent of efforts to curb gun violence, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky accused President Obama of using the families of massacred Newtown, Connecticut schoolchildren as “props.” Sen. Paul and his colleagues should consider whether it is they themselves who have become the props of an extremist fringe who have completely lost their way and any sense of decency.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, April 18, 2013
“Impervious To Logic”: Congress Betrays Our Dwindling Faith
The way to stay sane in this city is never to expect too much.
So the soothing mantras of the capital involve admonitions about the art of the possible, the perfect and the good, the zen of baby steps.
Incremental, incremental, incremental.
Still, it is hard to remain calm in the face of the Senate’s failure — its failure as the parents of children murdered in Newtown, Conn., looked on from the gallery — to pass the most modest of measures to curb gun violence.
We tend to speak easily here of how Washington is broken and gridlocked.
But those of us whose day jobs sit at the intersection of politics and public policy don’t completely buy it. We retain ragged shreds of faith that Washington, despite its maddening imperfections, remains capable of rising to at least some occasions.
Except on Wednesday, it didn’t, as the Senate fell six votes short of the 60 required to expand background checks for gun buyers. It is an indication of the perennially warped politics of guns that politicians can more safely support same-sex marriage than background checks. Indeed, what passed Congress in 1994 — an assault weapons ban and strict limits on magazine sizes — is now unthinkable.
The background-check measure proposed by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey is — I’ll refrain from the past tense, because Wednesday’s loss was not the final chapter — so sensible, so pared-down, that the stronger argument against it is that it failed to go far enough, not that it ran roughshod over the Second Amendment.
To review: Under current law, individuals who want to buy guns from licensed dealers must pass background checks. Manchin-Toomey would expand that requirement to in-state gun sales over the Internet (interstate sales are already covered, because the guns can be sent only to licensed dealers for transfer to the buyer), to gun shows and to other commercial transactions.
It would not apply to sales or transfers between family members and friends — notwithstanding the National Rifle Association’s claim that it would “criminalize the private transfer of firearms by honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members to get federal government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face prosecution.”
As Manchin said on the Senate floor, “That is simply a lie. . . . You can loan your hunting rifle to your buddy without any new restrictions. . . .You can give or sell a gun to your brother or your sister, your cousin, your uncle, your co-worker without a background check. You can post a gun for sale on the cork bulletin board at your workplace or on your church bulletin board without a background check.”
Another criticism of the measure — that it “would put us inexorably on the path to a national gun registry,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it — is even less moored to reality. A national registry is banned under existing law; Manchin-Toomey would layer on a 15-year felony sentence for anyone who tries to implement one.
That leaves an array of other arguments against the measure that fail the simplest tests of logic.
Felons and others ineligible to buy weapons aren’t being prosecuted under the current system. Also, the existing system fails to list numerous individuals already prohibited from having guns. Okay, prosecute the ineligible would-be buyers and fix the list.
Expanded background checks wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown shootings. Okay, but expanded checks might prevent another killer. No single change is going to prevent every episode of gun violence.
Expanded checks would impose a burden on law-abiding citizens without preventing criminals from obtaining guns. Under the existing system, more than 2 million people have been barred from buying guns. Did some of them go on to obtain weapons illegally? Of course. But others were deterred — and in any event the expanded checks would narrow the currently huge loophole that lets felons buy guns without background checks. That some criminals will always break some laws is not an argument against having those laws in the first place.
The depressing aspect of Wednesday’s vote is that the change was so small and the senators so seemingly impervious to logic.
Wednesday’s vote will not end the gun debate. After nearly two decades in which Democrats barely dared whisper about gun violence, the notion of new restrictions has become safe again — to broach, if not to enact. In the aftermath of Newtown, this time was different.
It just wasn’t different enough.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 18, 2013
“Caving To Fear”: The Senate Fails America
For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.
Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.
Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”
Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.
The National Rifle Association once supported the expansion of background checks, but it decided this time that President Obama and gun-control advocates could not be allowed even a scintilla of a victory, no matter how sensible. That group, and others even more militant, wanted to make sure not one bill emerged from the Newtown shooting, and they got their way. A vast majority of Republicans meekly followed along, joined by a few nervous red-state Democrats, giving far more weight to a small, shrill and largely rural faction than to the country’s overwhelming need for safety and sanity.
Guns had not been on the president’s campaign agenda, but, to his credit, he and Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. came up with a solid package of proposals after Newtown that would have reduced the number of dangerous weapons on the street and in the hands of criminals. Mr. Obama traveled the country to promote it in 13 speeches, and he has spent the last weeks unsuccessfully trying to pry senators out of the pocket of the gun lobby.
The most important aspect of his proposal, in the eyes of many gun-control advocates, was the expansion of background checks, both because it closed an important loophole and because it seemed the easiest to pass. From 20 percent to 40 percent of all gun sales now take place without a background check, and the bill rejected on Wednesday would have required the check for buyers at gun shows, on the Internet and at other commercially advertised sales. It was sponsored by two pro-gun senators with the courage to buck the lobby, Joe Manchin III, a Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick Toomey, a Republican of Pennsylvania.
The critical need for this measure was illustrated by a report in The Times on Wednesday that showed how easy it is for criminals to buy weapons on the Internet without a look at their backgrounds. One widely popular Web site contains tens of thousands of private postings of gun sales, and The Times’s investigation found that many buyers and sellers were criminals. Some of the guns have been used to kill.
A vote to continue this practice would be hard to explain to constituents, so lawmakers simply invented reasons to oppose background checks. Some insisted it would lead to a national gun registry, though the plain language of the bill prohibited that. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said it would raise taxes. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona said it would require checks even when a gun sale is posted on an office bulletin board. (There’s nothing wrong with that, but it wouldn’t.) Mr. Obama, after the vote, said those who made these arguments had “willfully lied.”
It’s now up to voters to exact a political price from those who defied the public’s demand, and Mr. Obama was forceful in promising to lead that effort. Wednesday was just Round 1, he said; the next step is to replace those whose loyalty is given to a lobby rather than the people.
“Sooner or later, we are going to get this right,” he said. “The memories of these children demand it, and so do the American people.”
By: The Editorial Board, The New York Times, April 17, 2013
“There Wil Be Consequences”: A Senate In The Gun Lobby’s Grip
Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.
On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.
Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.
I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.
Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.
I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.
People have told me that I’m courageous, but I have seen greater courage. Gabe Zimmerman, my friend and staff member in whose honor we dedicated a room in the United States Capitol this week, saw me shot in the head and saw the shooter turn his gunfire on others. Gabe ran toward me as I lay bleeding. Toward gunfire. And then the gunman shot him, and then Gabe died. His body lay on the pavement in front of the Safeway for hours.
I have thought a lot about why Gabe ran toward me when he could have run away. Service was part of his life, but it was also his job. The senators who voted against background checks for online and gun-show sales, and those who voted against checks to screen out would-be gun buyers with mental illness, failed to do their job.
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.
By: Gabrielle Giffords, Op-Ed Contributor; Democratic Representative from Arizona from 2007 to 2012, a founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions; The New York Times, April 17, 2013
“We Snookered The Other Side”: Proof That Congress Is A Captive Of The Extremists
Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey’s (R-PA) bipartisan compromise on expanding gun sale background checks was widely praised by gun safety advocates as an important reform, and slammed by the National Rifle Association as a step in the wrong direction. But at least one major gun group thinks that the conventional wisdom has it backwards.
Daylight Disinfectant has obtained video of Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, bragging that “we snookered the other side” by loading the Manchin-Toomey bill with pro-gun amendments.
“It’s a Christmas tree,” Gottlieb said to a Portland, OR crowd on Friday. “We just hung a million ornaments on it.”
“We’re taking the background check and making it a pro-gun bill,” he continued. “Unfortunately, some of my colleagues haven’t quite figured it out yet because they weren’t sitting in the room writing it. My staff was.”
“If you really read what’s in the Manchin-Toomey bill — man, it’s a godsend. We win rights back like crazy,” he later added. “I think we snookered the other side. They haven’t figured it out yet.”
Gottlieb also suggested that maybe he should have kept his opinion to himself, noting, “If we talk about it too much, the other side’s gonna find out about it and they’re gonna realize we’re gonna win off of this thing.” Video of the speech via Daylight Disinfectant:: http://youtu.be/E9UMox1WoTw
Indeed, although the Manchin-Toomey compromise would represent the most significant gun reform in two decades, it contains many elements that should please the “gun rights” crowd. The bill exempts private, not-for-profit sales from background checks (falling far short of the universal standard sought by many Democrats), allows concealed-carry permits to transfer across state lines, and explicitly bans the creation of a national gun registry, among other provisions. The compromises were enough to lead New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a prominent gun reform advocate, to lament, “This is a Congress that is captive of the extremists and there is no clearer proof of that than this.”
In addition to the Second Amendment Foundation, the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms — which claims to be the nation’s second-largest “gun rights” group, and with which Gottlieb is also closely associated — has also publicly endorsed the bill.
Still, it’s unclear whether this push from gun interest groups will actually make a difference in the final vote. As of now, just four Republican senators — Toomey, Susan Collins (R-ME), John McCain (R-AZ), and Mark Kirk (R-IL) — have signaled their intention to vote for the bill. Several red-state Democrats have also suggested that they will oppose the bill, despite the political cover provided by the gun interest groups. If a bipartisan bill that is so tame that “gun rights” groups hail it as a major victory cannot move through the Senate, then it would be safe to question whether any reform is truly possible.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, April 15, 2013
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