“The NRA’s War Of All Against All”: The World Is Not Made Up Of “Good Guys” And “Bad Guys.”
It’s quite salutary that Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association are getting so much attention, because the truth is that most Americans aren’t familiar with their rhetoric and the reality they inhabit. If you didn’t know too much about LaPierre but tuned in to see him on Meet the Press yesterday, you probably came away saying, “This guy is a lunatic” (a word we’ll get to in a moment).
I’m not talking about his preferred policy prescriptions. I’m talking about his view of the world. LaPierre gets paid close to a million dollars a year, which I’m guessing allows him a comfortable lifestyle. But he seems to imagine that contemporary America is actually some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape a la Mad Max, where psychotic villains in makeshift armor and face paint cruise through the streets looking for people to kill.
Why do we need armed guards in every school? “If we have a police officer in that school, a good guy, that if some horrible monster tries to do something, they’ll be there to protect them.” Monsters? Yes, “There are monsters out there every day, and we need to do something to stop them.” Should we improve our mental health system? Well, maybe not improve it so much as keep track of everyone who has ever sought mental health services. “We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of these lunatics…We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that’s got these monsters walking the streets.” There was also this: “Most of the media, when I go around this country, they’re protected by armed guards.” This got a lot of guffaws from journalists, because no one who works in the media knows anyone in the media who is protected by armed guards, except maybe Roger Ailes. Does LaPierre actually think that your average working journalist takes an armed escort when he goes down to City Hall to interview the deputy mayor? Who knows. But as LaPierre has candidly said, before “We have nothing to fear but the absence of fear.”
At his Friday press conference, LaPierre effectively offered a one-sentence summation of his group’s philosophy: “The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you talk without irony about “bad guys” and “good guys,” you’re inhabiting an imagined world that has absolutely nothing to do with reality, and it’s a good bet your ideas about policy are similarly absurd. But you can’t understand the NRA’s perspective without grasping the importance the good guy/bad guy dichotomy plays in their worldview. As far as they’re concerned, we are indeed living in that post-apocalyptic nightmare, where murderers and rapists are going to come banging down your door any second and the police are ineffectual.
What they never acknowledge, however, is that the typical gun murder isn’t a home invasion. Harold Pollack got data for his hometown of Chicago, and according to the police there were 433 murders there in 2011. How many happened in the course of a burglary? One. In the whole country, we get about 100 murders that happen this way. In 2011, 14,612 Americans were murdered; gun murders account for about 9,000 of those.
So what do the actual gun murders look like? They’re disagreements that get out of hand, people taking revenge for real or imagined slights, family members killing each other. They’re not the work of super-villains, or “lunatics,” or commando squads of “bad guys” (David Frum has more on this). But the NRA and its supporters believe that the home invasion is always just moments away, and that’s why our laws must allow everyone to be armed to the teeth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 24, 2012
“All Minds Are Little”: Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus
Well over 100 years ago, shortly after her eighth birthday in July, 1897, a young New Yorker named Virginia O’Hanlon put pen to paper in hopes of settling an argument she’d been having with some of her little playmates: Is there in fact a Santa Claus? She sent her brief letter to the New York Sun because, she explained, “Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.'”
Weeks passed without response from the newspaper, which apparently misplaced the letter. Young Virginia had just about given up hope. But on September 20, Edward P. Mitchell, the Sun’s editor, handed it to veteran writer Francis Pharcellus Church with instructions to craft a reply for the next day’s edition. Church had seen the worst of mankind, having covered the Civil War for the New York Times. But the editorial that he crafted conjures man’s best angels, which explains why it’s the most reprinted editorial ever.
As we try to come to grips with the awful fact that a score of six- and seven-year-olds in Connecticut will never see their eighth birthdays, Church’s words have special resonance. “Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus,” Church wrote. “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. … [Without Santa Claus] the eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”
When so many of those individual lights have been snuffed out, it’s important to remember the things that give life its “highest beauty and joy” and pull back the “veil covering the unseen world.”
Here’s Virginia O’Hanlon’s original letter:
DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.
And here, in full, is the unsigned editorial which Church penned:
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Thank God indeed.
As the right jolly old elf himself can be heard to exclaim, ere he drives out of sight:
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, December 24, 2012
“Shadow Republican Money Groups”: Soft Cash Changes Hands Between Crossroads GPS And The NRA
While the National Rifle Association has been making headlines in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. last week, its nonprofit affiliate has been flying under the radar.
The NRA Institute for Legislative Action is a conservative 501(c)(4) group that is not required to disclose its donors, but the Center for Responsive Politics dug up a six-figure contribution from a similar tax-exempt group.
In its investigation into shadow money groups, the Center uncovered a $600,000 donation to the NRA’s nonprofit from Crossroads GPS — the 501(c)(4) associated with Karl Rove and his super PAC, American Crossroads. In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action spent $7.4 million on independent expenditures, bringing the overall total spent by NRA-affiliated groups to $17.6 million.
In order to maintain 501(c)(4) status with the Internal Revenue Service, social welfare must be the main focus of these groups, so they cannot have more than half of their overall spending go toward politics.
According to an OpenSecrets Blog report from earlier this year, in 2010, Crossroads gave large sums to Americans for Tax Reform, National Federation of Independent Business, Center for Individual Freedom and National Right to Life. Recipients of Crossroads for the 2012 election cycle will not be available until next year when it files with the IRS.
The NRA, with its nonprofit affiliate, spent $11.4 million of the money they spent in the general election opposing Democrats and $5.9 million supporting Republicans. Within the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, about 63 percent of its $7.4 million was spent against Democrats, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Although the money trail is further clouded when one 501(c)(4) gives money to another, Crossroads GPS and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s goals were similar, as shown by their overlapping targeted candidates.
The NRA Institute for Legislative Action focused on 62 candidates, spending at least $100,000 on 11 of them. The most it dropped on a single candidate was the $3.2 million opposing President Barack Obama, followed by the $885,000 it spent favoring Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
In addition to Obama, other Democratic candidates the nonprofit opposed this election were Ohio Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown ($408,000), Florida Sen. Bill Nelson ($378,000) and Virginia Sen.-elect Tim Kaine ($350,000) — all of whom nevertheless won their respective races. On the other side, Republican benefactors included Sen.-elect Jeff Flake ($322,000), Wisconsin Senate candidate Tommy Thompson ($243,000) and Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel ($168,000).
The NRA’s PAC also spent about $9.5 million on independent expenditures that targeted many of the same candidates. The PAC spent about $16.1 million overall.
By: Michelle Martinelli, OpenSecrets.org, December 17, 2012
“There’s A Larger Story”: Why Won’t The Press Put U.S. Gun Violence In Context?
Another unfolding American gun massacre has produced an avalanche news coverage, but it’s coverage that continues to omit crucial context about gun violence and the rash of often public shooting sprees that plague the country. It’s a troubling journalism trend, and one that seems to be getting worse. As America recoils from new shootings, the news media are casting the gun horrors in less context, not more.
It’s true that the press is moving away from presenting shooting sprees as isolated incidents. The coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., has been rich with references to the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre from this summer. Then again, how can reporters not connect the dots from those two rampages to a sweeping cultural and criminal problem, and one that continues to worsen and extends to all corners of the country.
But simply acknowledging the deadly trend doesn’t mean the news media are providing much-needed context. For instance, each year roughly 30,000 Americans die from gun violence. By comparison, since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, approximately 4,300 Americans have died in that conflict.
As Forbes’ Rob Waters noted, from the period between 2000 to 2009, “If you exclude natural causes of death and consider only deaths caused by injury, [gun violence] is the second-leading cause of death over that time span; only car accidents (417,000) killed more people.” And according to Bloomberg News, the number of Americans killed by guns will soon exceed the yearly number of auto fatalities, as auto-related deaths are falling and gun fatalities are rising.
To understand the larger story of gun violence in America, people have to understand the context. People have to be aware of the 30,000 figure. They ought to know, for instance, that in the week since Newtown, an estimated 500 Americans have died from gunfire, and more than 1,200 have been wounded. They ought to know that just since the Sand Hook School massacre, approximately 50 more American children and teens have died from gunfire.
If we don’t understand the saturation status we’re not going to understand the steady stream of public shooting sprees.
But news consumers aren’t getting that information from the media – at least not in the wake of the Newtown tragedy.
Very few mentions of the 30,000 statistic have appeared in newspaper articles or on television segments about the Connecticut massacre. In fact, a Nexis search uncovers only two major newspaper news articles that referenced that key figure in the last week, one in the San Francisco Chronicle, on December 18, and one in the Hartford Courant December 19. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tampa Tribune and Indianapolis Star published references to the 30,000-death statistic in opinion pieces about the Newtown killings.)
On television, the references were just as rare: I found only four. One each on PBS, CNN, NBC and MSNBC.
It’s possible that a handful of additional newspaper news accounts and television discussions mentioned the fact that approximately 30,000 people die from gunfire every year. (Nexis transcripts don’t capture every cable news segment.) But given the extraordinary amount of coverage of the Newtown shooting, the press had ample opportunities to highlight the 30,000 number. But these findings indicate that the references were quite scarce. In fact, they were even scarcer than when I urged the press to include crucial gun death context following the Aurora gun massacre in July.
Other key points that have been largely ignored in the Newtown coverage:
•There are huge economic costs associated with gun violence. For example, firearm-related deaths and injuries resulted in medical and lost of productivity expenses of about $32 billion in the U.S., according to most recently available data.
•Gun violence is among the leading causes of premature death in the U.S.
•Among the world’s 23 wealthiest countries, 87 percent of all kids killed by guns are American kids.
The point here isn’t to simply to wallow in a grim statistics. It’s to illustrate how little context is included in the so-called ‘gun debate’ in this country. And especially the so-called gun debate that takes place in the media.
If that conversation is really going to happen it’s imperative Americans understand what’s at the center of the topic, and that sadly, this crisis extends far beyond Newtown.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, December 21, 2012
“Simplistic, Shameful And Opportunistic”: Connecticut School Officials Blast NRA’s Reaction To Newtown
Teachers, school superintendents, mayors and police chiefs in Connecticut are rejecting the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) response to the shooting in Newtown, describing the gun lobby’s proposal to equip schools with armed guards and more guns as too simplistic, shameful, and opportunistic.
One Connecticut school superintendent dismissed the NRA’s suggestion as “an ill-conceived reaction from an organization that does not have any credibility or expertise with respect to addressing school violence” and said that the idea “is an excuse for not addressing the need to enact meaningful safe gun legislation in conjunction with an investment in mental health services.” Putnam Police Chief Rick Hayes called the proposal “scary,” noting that teachers can’t possibly have the kind of training necessary to safely handle large weapons.
In fact, newspaper headlines across the state flatly rejected militarizing Connecticut schools:
The growing outrage against the organization extends beyond school officials — even state Republican politicians are weary of eliminating school gun-free zones. Senate Minority Leader John McKinney (R), whose district includes Sandy Hook Elementary School, called the proposal “ill-timed.” “I also don’t think his idea of undoing or repealing gun-free school zones is a good idea at all,” he said. “I’ve always understood, and believe, that our Second Amendment is an integral part of our Constitution, and people should have the right to bear arms … but I think we should have a fair conversation in this country about what the limits to those rights are.”
Schools across the state are enacting greater security measures, but more guns aren’t on the agenda. Instead, districts are focusing on adding interior classroom door locks, expanding swipe-card access and requiring staff to wear photo identification.
Tom Moore, assistant superintendent for administration for West Hartford schools, told the Hartford Courant that his district “won’t be taking our advice on how to keep kids safe from the president of the NRA.” He added, “I come from a family of hunters; I have four brothers who are hunters and members of the NRA. All I’ll be asking for for Christmas, after hearing Wayne LaPierre essentially blame school officials for the shootings, is for [my brothers] to resign from the NRA.”
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 
